The Penta Podcast Channel
Brussels 2024: What to expect from a new EU Parliament and Commission
In 2024, a wave of global elections is shaping the landscape of corporate engagement, increasing partisan contention across virtually every issue. On today's episode of What's At Stake, we drill down on the upcoming European elections.
From our Brussels office, Penta Senior Partner Jill Craig and Partner Rory O'Donnell join Andrea Christianson, partner in the D.C. office, to discuss the key players in the EU elections, what issues voters are paying the most attention to, and what businesses around the world can expect from a new European Parliament and Commission. The group also shares insight on how companies should prepare for this new political landscape.
If you're a business currently operating in Europe or are considering expanding your operations across the pond, tune in to this must-listen episode.
In 2024, a wave of global elections is shaping the landscape of corporate engagement, increasing partisan contention across virtually every issue. On today's episode of What's At Stake, we drill down on the upcoming European elections.
From our Brussels office, Penta Senior Partner Jill Craig and Partner Rory O'Donnell join Andrea Christianson, partner in the D.C. office, to discuss the key players in the EU elections, what issues voters are paying the most attention to, and what businesses around the world can expect from a new European Parliament and Commission. The group also shares insight on how companies should prepare for this new political landscape.
If you're a business currently operating in Europe or are considering expanding your operations across the pond, tune in to this must-listen episode.
Welcome to this week's episode of what's at Stake. I'm your regular host, brian DeAngelis, sitting here in DC and bringing something a little different this week. 2024, as many of our listeners know, is the year of elections, with more elections happening globally than ever before. Throughout the year, penta will have you covered with analysis on many of the elections and their implications for businesses and their most important stakeholders. Today, we have a special episode in store for our listeners where we're sharing a recent conversation led by Andrea Christensen, my colleague here in the DC office, discussing the elections for the European Parliament taking place in about a month's time with two of our experts from Penta's Brussels office partners, jill Craig and Rory O'Donnell. Take a listen as the group discusses the key players in the EU elections and what businesses around the world can expect from a new parliament and commission. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining us for this webinar Brussels 2024, new parliament, new commission what does it mean for you? I'm Andrea Christensen, I'm a partner in our DC office and I'll be your host and moderator for this discussion and what we can expect from the upcoming June elections in the EU and what the outcome could mean for American companies operating there. So, as you know, penta is the premier stakeholder solutions firm. We combine data analytics, business acumen and government insights to help our clients understand how stakeholders perceive them, but also develop and execute strategies to bridge the gap between current perceptions and desired outcomes. And today I'm thrilled to introduce the hosts of our conversation. First is Jill Craig. Jill is a Brussels-based senior partner and has led Pence's office there for more than a decade. She has more than 25 years of experience in public affairs and corporate communication, primarily in agribusiness, trade, energy and financial services.
Speaker 2:Second, rory O'Donnell. Rory is a partner in Pence's Brussels office and works primarily in international agriculture, food and trade. He has over 30 years of experience working in the UK civil service, with the last nine years spent in the UK mission to the EU working on agri-food, trade and Brexit, including the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol. So done, lots of great stuff. Thank you, rory. Logistically we're planning a 45 minute session, presentation time and Q&A at the end, but we want you to feel free to put questions in the Q&A panel there at the bottom that you should see, and I'll be monitoring that and will interrupt politely as possible, and so I will stop talking and turn it over to our Brussels colleagues, jill and Rory, and turn it over to our Brussels colleagues Jill and Rory.
Speaker 3:Thanks very much, andrea. Great to be here and good to have the opportunity to talk about Europe to an American audience, and we're delighted to have that chance. It's a big year for the EU because lots of things are about to change and so we want to walk you through that. Andrea has already said a bit about what we are. We're definitely here and certainly in a market like Brussels to focus on improving the understanding between our clients and stakeholders, who are primarily decision makers. That's what we do. Here is a bit of where we do that. We see a little blob there for Brussels and we have a strong link, obviously, with the other regulatory center in Washington DC.
Speaker 3:So, as I said, 2024 is a big year in the EU context. So we wanted to, just at the front end, give you some overview of the environment in which this European Parliament election is about to happen. So I think it's not an exaggeration to say that this is a pivotal year for the EU, as it is every five years, because this is the opportunity, it's the moment when the European policymakers get the chance to set out a vision and an ambition for how the policymaking landscape will look for the next five years. So we're going to talk you through a bit about those changes and some of the issues that we expect to see in that vision for the next five years. We talked about the fact that it was an election year here. In fact, although the European Parliament election is happening across all 27 member states of the EU within the same week, inevitably many voters will be voting with a national lens, so the majority of those countries are having this election out of their election cycle, so they're not happening at the same time as other national or regional elections and therefore, inevitably they will be thinking about national issues. And given that this is an opportunity for a protest vote or indeed to express a view outside of a standard election cycle, we expect that to be quite volatile, as we do in every European Parliament election year. I want to give you some ways to tackle that as well, and we'll get to that towards the end of our conversation, but we are very happy to pick up questions, as Andrea said, as we go through, so please don't hesitate to do that, just as a sort of overview of what are Europeans thinking about as we head into this election. We could have put only one little star here, and that would have been the economy. I think it's fair to say that all the other things are a subsection of that.
Speaker 3:We've seen the cost of living increase. This is leading to discomfort in many countries in Europe, to discomfort in many countries in Europe, and that it has been also due to the impact of the war in Ukraine, which is on the borders of, indeed, some EU member countries and therefore it's a very, very live issue, and we've seen that impact on energy, energy prices, food, food security, and so inevitably, as well as the defense and security issues which are high on people's radar at the moment, there's an increasing sense of issues around national identity. What does Europe look like, what we should be doing in Europe about migration from the Middle East and from Africa in particular? But Europe is yet to come up with a sensible solution for that, and therefore this is a topic which is rising up the national agenda as well.
Speaker 3:Also related on an economic sense what is the ambition of climate policy now in Europe is a big question for the next five years, and Europeans will be thinking about that. Has it gone too far? We've seen farmer protests. We've seen rolling back of some policy agendas because the previous targets had perhaps been too ambitious, and so this is something else that is on the key list of topics that people are thinking about as we roll into this election, but I'm going to hand over now to Rory, who's going to talk us through actually what this means in practice in this changeover year.
Speaker 4:Very much, jill. Good morning, stroke afternoon all. So I'm going to talk you through some of the. There's a risk of it getting techie, I'll do my best not to do that. But what actually happens and, as this slide shows, it's not just one thing that will happen. As Andrea and Jill have said, it's an election year in the EU, so the first thing that will happen between the 6th and 9th of June is European Parliament elections. They happen on different days in different member states, but the votes start to get counted after the last polling booth closes. So that's the first thing that will happen, and the results will be fairly clear the week after. What the balance is within the new European Parliament. That is important because the European Parliament then have to have a role to play in the appointment of the next Commission President.
Speaker 4:A little bit about the Commission for non-Brussels bubble people. The European Commission is essentially the administrative wing of the European Union. Like many governments, it's broken down into different departments that deal with specific issues so energy, transport, agriculture, you name it and is staffed at the head by an appointee, a commissioner, who is nominated by a member state, but the staff and the commission are permanent employees of the European Commission so effectively. Their civil service and the commission president is on top of the whole thing and the parliament have to vote in favour of the commission president. The parliament also have a role in the appointment of or the approval of nominated commissioners. So once the elections happen in the parliament, then the next phase of the process of the changeover in Brussels starts to kick in. We can expect the first vote on the commission president. There's some debate about whether that will happen in July or September. I think the money is on possibly September, because there is only one meeting of the European Parliament in July and they will use that meeting to establish their positions and will then have a vote on the Commission President in September. The Commission President is nominated by the heads of all of the member states and they meet towards the end of June to decide on who their nominee should be. So that is broadly the sequence.
Speaker 4:Next slide, please. I think that sets it out in a bit more detail. Elections at the start of June, council nominate commission president At the end of June. Vote by the parliament on who the commission president should be Probably September, but not impossible that it would be in July. Then member states each nominate a commissioner to the commission president. In previous years the commission president has asked for them to nominate a man and a woman so she can ensure balance across the commission. Let's see if that happens this time or not. Member states will lobby for which portfolio they would like their commission to have, and if you're a bigger member state, like France or Germany or one of the others, you may have some influence on which portfolio you get. But the final decision on which portfolio is for the commission president, and then that person has to do an appearance in front of the relevant committee of the European Parliament, where they get asked questions about what they understand of the portfolio. At that stage, the Parliament could reject the nominee, in which case another one needs to be put forward, and at the end of the process the Parliament votes for the full suite of who the nominated commissioners are, and that's likely to be probably November by the time the hearings have taken place. So, even though the start of the process is in June, we then enter into approximately six months of wrangling over who gets what job and what that will then mean. So it's quite a protracted process, but by the end of the year we should have a new commission in place, worst case scenario, early next year. So it's a bit of a journey between now and the end of the year.
Speaker 4:Next, please, this is just a bit more on the elections themselves. I've covered much of this. I guess the one thing I didn't say is MEPs, members of the European Parliament, sit for a period of five years, so I don't think we need to say much more about that, except that polls suggest let me get into it. It's okay, jill, we can go to the next. One Polling is suggesting that there is a bit of a move to the right across Europe.
Speaker 4:The sorts of issues people are worried about tend to be ones that more right-wing parties can benefit from. So the little picture on the left there shows the makeup of the current parliament, and the one on the right is the latest projection of what might happen in June. Now it's interesting that the projections as of, I think, yesterday are quite different to what they were in even two or three months ago. Two or three months ago they expect there was a bigger swing to the right being projected. That has come down a little bit, and these are only projections, and this changes quite a lot, I think, as we found in a few elections over the last five or 10 years. Sometimes polling doesn't do a great job, and one thing polling seems to struggle a bit with is people voting for more populist parties, either because they don't want to tell the pollster what they're going to do or just an inbuilt bias into the way they analyse the data. So these figures could swing again, but if we move to the next slide it gives us a sense of what we think might happen.
Speaker 4:So here, traditionally the European Parliament is made up of a number of different political groupings. Quite hard to translate totally accurately for an American audience, but the EPP are kind of I guess, as close as you get maybe to mainstream Republicans, sort of centre-right. S&d I won't get into whether that's Democrat or not, but sort of centre-left. And then there are various other parties that go further in each direction and the renew grouping, sort of liberals, sit in and around the middle.
Speaker 4:Historically the way they've made things work is you form some sort of a grand coalition within the parliament, essentially to ensure you have enough votes to get the preferred candidates for commission president elected in the parliament, and historically that has been. Epp and S&D come together and then sometimes they require one other party to give themselves the necessary votes. For the first time, though this election it is at least theoretically possible that you could have a centre-right-right coalition, so you wouldn't have the traditional centre-right and centre-left coming together. But on current projections it's just about enough to command a majority, and I think some of the parties within that coalition may find it hard to agree on lots of things. So I think the most likely outcome is still a grand coalition, and the first job of that coalition is to vote on the nomination for the commission president. So it just shows the old ways are still looking like they'd be there, but the move to the right is definitely happening, and I think that has potential implications.
Speaker 2:Rory, could I interrupt you really quickly and ask did I hear you right when you said that this could be the first time that there's a right centre-right coalition majority possibility?
Speaker 4:Yes, so every time previously, five or six times, it's been basically EPP and S&D are the two biggest parties and they control a lot, but sometimes they required renews. Renews are sort of the Liberal Party grouping and they were certainly needed last time in order to ensure that, commissioner, commission President von der Leyen had sufficient votes to get approved by the Parliament. So it is the first time. It's a possibility. I think it's. I still think it's unlikely, but it's the first time it's been a possibility.
Speaker 2:Okay, and what do you think would be the biggest changes that would come out of that possibility if there was a right-center-right coalition majority?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think on many issues it would just be a slightly exaggerated effect. So, for example, climate ambition I think if there was a right centre, right grouping in control in the parliament, you would probably have further watering down of some of the Green Deal. You would definitely have much more difficult discussions around migration. You would probably have some quite interesting discussions around agriculture policy.
Speaker 4:There have been protests in Brussels and across Europe over the last few months, fundamentally saying that the environmental requirements being placed on farmers make them uncompetitive and unprofitable, as a result of which quite a number of those ambitions have been watered down. I think with a more right coalition you may see further watering down across climate and environment generally, but quite a few of the. There have been a few farmer parties who have sprung up in member states and they tend to be centre-right-right. There are some exceptions to that, but broadly that seems to be a coalition, so we could expect to see some things happening there and, interestingly, under the next mandate of both the Commission and Parliament, the next round of reform of agriculture policy will happen. So there are potentially quite broad implications, should that be the case.
Speaker 3:Next, please I think as well you know it's an indicator as well to the candidate who would be the Commission President to make allowances for what might be demanded by those parties that are more to the right, what would need to be given up, what would need to go into the programme of the next European Commission and what sort of commitments and promises would need to be made by the future Commission President in order to get approval by the majority.
Speaker 4:That's totally right and, interestingly, current President von der Leyen hasn't said very much about agriculture in her five years in charge, but since the farmer protest started she has been more vocal and has worked with her colleagues in the Parliament to water down some of the environmental ambitions. Now, there's lots of reasons why that might happen, but one is, as they approach the elections, they don't want her political grouping to be seen, one that isn't on the side of farmers. So we've already seen how chasing votes may be a bit unfair, but how, looking at the electoral arithmetic, has resulted in some policy changes already. And that's before we've got to the position after the elections Next, please, next, please, yeah. And this is just to go back to the first point, which is the parliamentary elections are the start of the process. Once Parliament's in place, we then move on to the Commission, starting with the President and then starting with Commissioners. And the thing that's interesting about it in the same way as the President or the nomination for President of the Commission may need to make some concessions in order to secure the necessary votes in the Parliament to get approved, the people who are nominated for Commission portfolios will also have to have a hearing in the Parliament where they will be asked questions about what their priorities are, about whether they'll take up issue X or Y. So, even though the hearings only last for a few hours and happen sort of October time, there will be things said in those hearings that will have implications for policy initiatives over the following five years. So you could see, for example, a trade commissioner being asked do they have an ambitious trade agenda? Will they do a trade deal with country X, y or Z? And they will give answers to those questions that could bind what they might do going forward and I think the ones that we look at quite carefully. Certainly I will give, in my role, the Agriculture Commissioner's Hearing, the Environment Commissioner's Hearing, climate Commissioner, because there'll be competing questions. On the one hand you will have pro-agriculture MEPs saying surely you impose additional burdens on the agriculture sector, but you'll also have green MEPs and others who will be saying is it not time for agriculture to play its part in relation to environmental ambition? So it's quite a crucial point in the process, not for setting firm policy, but certainly it could make some commitments that will then need to be followed up in subsequent years. So that's quite an important part of what will happen towards in the early autumn.
Speaker 4:Next, please, and the last one for me likely priorities for the next Commission. I mean we talked about this a bit at the start with what are Europeans thinking about? And whilst there isn't always a direct link between what the people are thinking about and what the Commission are thinking about, sometimes the Commission have their own ideas I think, broadly the sorts of things we can expect future commission to be thinking around is competitiveness, strategic autonomy. In some ways, I mean this could be portrayed a wee bit as a more comprehensive response to the IRA in Washington, where the EU will want to support, where possible, various industries, become a bit more protectionist than it already is. So I think that that will be. That will be a thing, I think.
Speaker 4:Defence there is talk that for the first time there will be a defence commissioner. That's not happened before Now. Exactly how that will play out, time will tell. But the war in Ukraine, I think, has focused attention in Europe not just on vulnerabilities to an aggressive Russia, but some vulnerabilities around supply of military hardware etc. So you can see they want to have a look at what they can do there. Their ambition will probably be beyond what they can actually deliver, but it's a departure really for the commission. So I think that's quite interesting.
Speaker 4:Regulation of technology and this is an area where the commission will see itself as being a bit ahead of other regulatory hubs. They already have some legislation. Ai there is increasing talk in relation to what needs to be done around social media. It's become a bigger issue Young people, smartphones, those sorts of issues. The relevant commissioner was on the news this morning talking about that and I guess, instinctively when the commission sees a problem, it wants to regulate. So we can expect to see some stuff there.
Speaker 4:Climate environment will be interesting and again dependent on the parliamentary elections. Will they try and move back on the parliamentary elections? Will they try and move back on some of the softening that's happened over the last six months or so, or will there be further softening and that? That would be an active debate again. It's an area where the european union sees itself as a world leader, uh, ambitious in climate, uh, and trying to lead the world and doing things like that, uh, so it would be interesting to see, but we expect there'll be. There will be something there, as I said earlier.
Speaker 4:Agriculture the next round of agriculture reform, which is a two or three year process will start next year, I would guess. So that will be a big area. It still is the biggest budget in the European Union. It gets about a third of all the money that the European Union has. So it's a significant issue. And finally, immigration I mean it's an issue, it seems to be an issue everywhere now, not just in Europe, but it is increasingly an issue that has struggled to deal with. But again, a move to the right of the Parliament, I think, will put additional pressure on the Commission to come forward with some proposals to try and deal with that. And I think that is it for me. I hand back to you, nigel, unless I've forgotten a slide.
Speaker 3:Let's see so, indeed. So what would all of that mean for businesses that are operating in Europe? In very simple terms, I mean, obviously, if you are a US-based or a business or a business-based anywhere outside of the EU or indeed in the EU, you have to comply, as a minimum, with the rules that are in place in the EU, and that's just the cost of doing business. We just call the license to operate. That's a minimum, so that is, knowing what's going on and what's going to affect you is a sort of minimum requirement, I suppose. But, as Rory just said, you know, the EU's response to many issues is actually to regulate, and so we can expect to see more legislation. That's not just our gut feeling. We've seen that. Many of you who have experience working with EU policies will have seen examples. For example, you know the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, before that data protection, gdpr. There was also, in this current term of EU policymakers, more interest in regulating supply chains, so we've seen deforestation-free supply chains being mandatory, and many of these elements are important to Europe but also have extraterritorial application, which means that wherever you are in the world, you have to take them on, and we often also talk about Brussels as a leading regulatory hub, where others, particularly in Asia, take on European rules because they're already made and so they're more likely to lean into those than to create their own. Therefore, given this likely response to issues, it's important that that businesses are ready to deal with that expectation that we have that there'll be more legislation coming down the track, and equally, then, the decision for each organization is what to do about that legislation that's coming. Should you engage and try to influence the outcome of those legislative discussions or do you just want to wait and see, monitor what happens and accept? Therefore, whatever the outcome is? Obviously, we would very much encourage you to do the former. There's a much better outcome for you if you've been involved in the process, and indeed the European policymaker research that PENTA has undertaken last year, last fall, showed very clearly that European policymakers are very, very keen to hear more from business about what they want to see. They want to see data, they want to see input to policies, because we don't have enormous administrations here in Europe and therefore you know they want to make sure that they have all the data and input that they possibly can to make the best possible legislation at the end of it.
Speaker 3:Obviously, there are ways for you to keep in touch with what's going on in Brussels without working with us.
Speaker 3:There are very many Brussels-focused media outlets, not least Politico, euractiv and others who cover EU affairs very closely. It's important also to be clear that, after Washington, brussels is still the largest hub for international journalists and so many many publications US-based publications have bureaus here or certainly correspondents here, who will be covering some of the high-level topics which are of interest. Obviously, the more you want to get into the nitty gritty of particular issues, then you will need to watch this much more closely. But there's very many ways in which you can keep up with what's going on at EU level by logging in, and we can certainly help out with advising on some of the areas, some of the outlets that you can tune into, many of which are free outlets that you can tune into, many of which are free. So that's everything that we wanted to say to you at this point, but we're obviously we want to give a sort of high level to allow you to ask us more, quite more detailed questions on issues that are of particular interest to you. So we're all yours.
Speaker 2:Yeah and Jill, I've got a couple of questions here. The first is can you comment on the likely color of MEPs returned from the largest EU countries and what that might mean for the key economic business related committees in the parliament and the parliament's policy orientation generally?
Speaker 4:Corey, do you want to start? Yeah, so look, there is polling being done at member state level, so there is information around who's likely to return where. I think, though, there is a pattern across the EU that the party, the EPP so the sort of centre-right grouping is predicted to still be the largest party, and potentially even slightly larger than it currently is. In the next parliament, the parties that seem to be in for the most difficult time are the Renew Liberal grouping and the Greens. They seem to be having a tough time in the polls.
Speaker 4:What's interesting about the Renew grouping is they have quite a lot of their membership comes from France, one of the key member states, I mean the two most important member states, probably France and Germany, so we can expect to see the far right in France maybe take some of the more liberal MEP seats, the more liberal MEP seats. So I think it is the pattern across member states will probably reflect the pattern across the whole parliament, I mean. One other point that I would make is turnout in European elections is generally quite a bit lower than turnout in national elections, and I think that allows more fringe parties to do well. You need to get if you've got committed supporters you can. You can generally do quite well in the elections. So I don't think, even though the big industrial member states you may think that will have a wider impact. I think the picture across the parliament will be reflected in member state elections as well.
Speaker 3:That's my sense yeah, just to add on as well. I mean, if you think about the, the greens, which, in the projections we showed in that slide, the greens are the, the group which are projected to do the least or to lose big, the big losers a lot of that is likely to that loss is likely to come from Germany, where they sit in the government coalition at the moment, which is rather fraught, and therefore it's likely that there'll be a protest in Germany against that and that will be reflected in the European results. There's also a question mark about which committee structure we might actually have in the European Parliament. It's possible that that might be reviewed as well, and those of us who have been around a bit longer have seen as well.
Speaker 3:I mean, a few years ago, particularly after the financial crisis, the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, which is the one that looks after all the financial services legislation, for example, was the one that everybody wanted to be on. We were almost fighting people off to get into that committee, whereas in this current mandate that's just coming to an end, people had to be almost corralled, be harassed, to join that committee because it was seen as a bit less sexy than other committees like environment and climate and other issues tech which had more appeal. So it'll be interesting to see again where the leading MEPs actually choose to sit and which issues they choose to follow, and that will be an indicator as well of which policies are likely to be the most, the most, the highest on the list of priorities.
Speaker 2:Thanks, jill and Rory. Another question is how much is the so-called mirror clause approach gaining support among political groups and industry, and how realistic is it to see an increase in such measures?
Speaker 3:Definitely going to leave that to Rory.
Speaker 4:I think it's definitely on the up. I think the EU increasingly sees itself as setting standards for the world, and they want to use various policy initiatives trade primarily, but others to try and impose on other countries the similar standards to the ones that they impose on themselves. So we have deforestation recently. I mean it's quite controversial globally, but it's also quite controversial within the EU, because everybody has to abide by the same set of rules and whilst the target for the legislation may be some African countries and some South American countries, there are some member states who do quite a lot of forestry and they're a bit worried that they're going to be held to a standard where they think what they're doing is sustainable and what others are doing isn't. So I think we can expect to see an increase in the use of marine resources. I think it's a direction of travel that's been going down for a while.
Speaker 2:Thanks, rory. And then another question is are there any national issues in member states that are overshadowing the European-wide election rhetoric?
Speaker 4:I mean Jill said a bit earlier and I think she's right that because it's an election that happens once every five years, I think national issues will probably dominate the European elections. Even though they're electing people to the European Parliament rather than national parliaments Slovakia or Italy or Finland, I mean there's across the EU people will probably continue to vote on those sorts of questions, whether it's migration or whether it's too much ambition in relation to climate. I think the basis of the elections will probably be problems they have at a national level, and I think that's just the nature of the fact that they're once every five years. In some countries they are combining the European elections with other elections.
Speaker 4:In Belgium, for example, there are certainly regional elections happening at the same time. There might even be national elections. So there the link is being made much more closely. People are going to the poll and they won't be able to distinguish between what they think about at a European level versus what are they thinking about in relation to the part of the country they live in. So I think, really, national issues will probably be much more dominant than a broader European set of issues would be my interpretation.
Speaker 2:Okay, and a good follow-up to that is we're seeing quite a lot of division between the far right and the hard right parties in Europe play out in public over differing views to Russia, ukraine, among other things. Is it possible that fears about their rise may be overblown, as they may not be disciplined enough to actually deliver a lot of their populist messages around anti-climate, anti-immigration, et cetera?
Speaker 4:Look, it's a very good question and I think there is truth in it. But one note of caution. My own personal view is I think we might be underestimating how well the right and far right will do. But that's just a gut instinct. Let's see what happens.
Speaker 4:But I think the other thing that's happened that's quite interesting is so in Italy we've got Giorgia Maloney. Has come in from quite a far-right party but has been moving towards the centre since her election and is even talking about thinking about which grouping in the European Parliament her party should sit post-election. So there's a combination of the extreme nationalist parties find it hard to coalesce around issues because they're so nationalist. So if all you care about is Slovakia, then you're not going to really care much about other member states.
Speaker 4:The slightly less hard right, but still fairly right I think, are looking at ways in which they can get a bit more into the mainstream to maximise their influence, and I think that's it's quite interesting that that someone, the writer had been a bit more pragmatic, and we've seen examples of that in italy. In france, I think things have changed a little bit as well. Marine le pen seems to have softened a bit. Uh, the party that her father was in charge of a few years ago. So the right are thinking about where they want to be, um and and how and how they do, how they deal with that and how they maximise their influence. The harder right, I think maybe they'll stay a bit out in the cold for a while yet. But what will be quite interesting is there is a process whereby parties can change which grouping they sit in in the parliament, and that'll be interesting to observe because that will have implications for what happens with the policy.
Speaker 3:Implicit in that question was, or explicit in that question was, that not all the parties that will be in that group or those groupings will actually agree with each other.
Speaker 3:And therefore, even though I agree with Rory that I suspect there will be a lot of them, they won't necessarily act as a tight-knit group and apply the weight of membership of a group that other more tight knit groups like the centre right or the centre left, are disciplined to do, because they're not used to working together with others and they don't agree with each other, with others and they don't agree with each other.
Speaker 3:And the other thing that I would add to that is that it's still to be seen. I mean, some of those parties, particularly in the far right, are populist by nature and it would be interesting to see whether or not they actually want to contribute to the workings of the EU, to move policy to the right and take on jobs and take on actual scrutiny of legislation, or whether they actually prefer, in fact, to disrupt and not get involved in the day-to-day work of the Parliament. And if they leave it to others, then it may well be that actually others that are used to actually being more cooperative in the Parliament could continue to do that, despite the fact that the numbers are against them. So I think there's still a lot of unknowns of how all of that will play out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, jill, and I think last question here is you know we talked a little bit about how the EU sees itself as leading, particularly in technology and climate policy, and, rory, you mentioned deforestation as an issue to watch. Are there any other issues to watch that are kind of nascent, that you see the EU wanting to establish itself as a leader on?
Speaker 3:Well, when we were talking about what the likely priorities of the next commission would be, the top two that we put down were an industrial policy for Europe, by sort of European competitiveness, and defense, because those are sort of the likely next big things. We're probably in Europe behind the US and even China on both of those topics. So even though they're likely to be big priorities at EU level, we're probably not leadership issues. I think maybe we have to come back to the climate question. It's still very unclear, as we've said, whether we'll be driving that forward in Europe in the same way and, you know, hailing our credentials as leaders there or whether we'll walk back from that. So I think still some unknowns there as well.
Speaker 2:Great, thank you. And there is one last question Any predictions on Ursula von der Leyen being the next commission president?
Speaker 4:Any predictions on Ursula von der Leyen being the next commission president. I mean, I am a betting man but I haven't read. I don't tend to bet on elections. I think she's still the favourite, but I think there are. Six months ago she was definitely favourite, no question.
Speaker 4:Not really talking about alternatives. There is a bit more chatter around alternatives now, so it's interesting to see. But if I was going to bet a few euros I would probably bet on her, but I wouldn't. I mean Mario Draghi, who, from Italy, has been talked about a bit. There are a few other names that are floating around and in itself that's quite interesting. So the you know people are are wondering what, what the alternatives might be. The only other thing I'd say is that this time five years ago nobody had heard of ursula von der leyen. She. She emerged as a compromise candidate when council couldn't quite work out who was most likely to get it. So and it's not the first time somebody's come out of left field to get to get the job. So I think it's by no means guaranteed, but I would still say favorite.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, on that note, thank you, jill and Rory. Thank you everyone who participated. We'll share a recording of this if if helpful, and always happy to answer any other questions you have, and hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the day, thank you.