24/08/2026
Last June, the European People’s Party voted again with the hard-right political groups sitting to its right, solidifying the emergence of an alternative right-wing majority within the EU Parliament.
Barely a week apart in mid-July, the European People’s Party did it again – twice. First, in the Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee, EPP votes helped water down the response to confirmed misuse of EU taxpayer money by the far-right Patriots for Europe group. Days later, in the Legal Affairs Committee, EPP votes helped shield a fellow EPP member from a prosecutor-led investigation, with the far right supplying the winning margin. Both are now logged on our EU Far-Right Tracker – but they deserve a closer look, because together they show just how routine this pattern has become.
Episode 1: Covering for the far right’s own finances
The EU Parliament secretariat confirmed that the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group irregularly spent roughly €277,000 in the second half of 2024. Coordinators from the Socialists & Democrats, Renew Europe, Greens/EFA and The Left called it strikingly similar to the mismanagement already found in PfE’s predecessor group, Identity and Democracy – no coincidence, since staff, delegations and service providers carried straight over between the two. Parliament had a formal committee opinion for cases like this. It used a bare administrative letter instead, drafted without the political groups. The EPP passed it by joining PfE, the ECR and the ESN. The letter sidesteps whether PfE is legally ID’s successor, names no one responsible, and drops any call to cooperate with investigators. The four pro-European coordinators called it what it was: political cover.
Episode 2: Protecting one of their own
Days later, the Legal Affairs Committee took up a request from Slovenian prosecutors to lift the immunity of EPP MEP Matej Tonin, over alleged abuse of office dating to 2023, using his seat on Slovenia’s intelligence oversight committee to seek wiretap and case information the law didn’t permit. On 15 July, the committee voted it down: 13 against, 10 in favour, one abstention. The EPP supplied the core of that majority, joined by the ECR, Patriots and ESN – overturning its own rapporteur’s recommendation. Tonin denies the allegations and says the case shows political persecution; the plenary decides in September. Whatever the merits of the underlying case, the bloc that decided it in committee was, again, the EPP plus the far right.
How the far right is tightening its grip over the EU
As The Good Lobby’s Founder, Professor Alberto Alemanno has recently argued in an op-ed for EUobserver, the “grand coalition” – made of EPP, S&D, and Renew – that has been governing Europe over the past decades has lost command of Europe’s political direction. Today the formal pro-European majority holds a comfortable 450-plus seats out of 720, yet Ursula von der Leyen was reconfirmed as Commission President in 2024 with only 401 votes – a margin that depended on the ECR, the Patriots and the ESN. As we documented, since then, that pattern has repeated on file after file. Professor Alemanno returned to the argument a few weeks later in The Guardian, pointing directly to the EU Far-Right Tracker as evidence: since 2024, he noted, the EPP has voted with the far right more than 20 times.
Researchers at the Brussels think tank CEPS described this dynamic as one where the EU Parliament increasingly behaves like a minority government, with the EPP as kingmaker. Their analysis notes that on migration files in particular, the EPP has this term voted more often with the ECR and Patriots than with its own S&D or Renew partners. Originally referred to as “Venezuela majority,” it was first tested on symbolic votes, such as the Resolution of 19 September 2024 on the situation in Venezuela, and now increasingly deployed on substantive legislative files like the June 2026 Return Regulation, which passed 418 to 218 under the chant of “Send them back! Send them back!” from the chamber floor.
The numbers back this up. Political scientist Nicolai von Ondarza’s monthly vote tracking found that in June 2026 alone, seven of the Parliament’s 35 final votes – one in five – passed only because a far-right group supplied the votes needed for a majority. Those weren’t all migration files, either: the list included tobacco taxation, a Cuba resolution and wastewater rules.
That same month, the EPP ended up on the winning side of 97.1% of votes, a full 11 points ahead of the S&D’s 85.7%, the widest gap von Ondarza has recorded. The EPP still votes with Renew and S&D far more often overall than with the far right, but on the files where it counts most, that’s no longer where its majority comes from.
What the EPP says
The EPP maintains it has no formal pact with the ECR, Patriots or ESN, and frames each of these votes as an issue-by-issue case judgment rather than a standing alliance.
In the Tonin case, an EPP source told Politico that colleagues across several groups flagged inconsistencies in the prosecutors’ file. Yet if you judge that justification against the EPP’s voting track record, a deeper reality emerges. In one week alone, two parliamentary committees witnessed the convergence of the EPP and the three political groups sitting to its right.
To know more
As we anticipated in our study titled To Engage or Not to Engage with the Far Right?, civil society is now operating with a Parliament where far-right groups hold over a quarter of seats and a mainstream party treats them as a reliable governing partner whenever the numbers get tight.
Every entry we add to the EU Far-Right Tracker confirms that EPP’s convergence with hard-right ideology deliberate and part of a broader political project, whose consequences for EU integration are still to be seen.
Read Alberto Alemanno’s two recent pieces on this pattern: “Europe’s grand coalition is over” (EUobserver, 7 July 2026) and “How the far right is tightening its grip over the EU – from the inside” (The Guardian, 18 August 2026)