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The European Electoral Act governing elections to the European Parliament provides that the results of national electoral processes for the election of Members of the European Parliament will not be made public until the last polling station is closed.
Yesterday, on 9 June, the scheduled time was 11pm.
However, in a surprise move, Ursula Von der Leyen appeared more than forty minutes before the closing time, announcing two things: one, that the European People’s Party ‘had won’ and two, that she, as current Commission President and candidate for re-election, was going to maintain the great cohabitation with socialists, greens and the big losers, Renew Europe. Furthermore, Ursula announced a cordon sanitaire against, according to her, the extremes of the right and left.
All this is extraordinarily serious: firstly, the lack of respect for national electoral systems, since no results had yet been published and votes were still being cast somewhere in Europe; Secondly, that without even having held any debate in the Council and the European Parliament, he is already announcing an agreement with the European left – a good example of the absence of true democracy in the functioning of the Brussels institutions – and thirdly, that he is announcing a wall between Europeans, a ‘cordon sanitaire’, which is substantially contrary to the spirit of unity that should animate any political project, with the intention of excluding precisely the reformist, patriotic, conservative and identitarian political forces that are growing in Europe.
A bad start to the legislature, if this is the way forward for the ruling elites in Brussels, led by Ursula. We shall see how events unfold.