Roberta Metsola re-elected as EP chairwoman with a record-high consensus

It just took one round vote to reconfirm Roberta Metsola at the helm of the European Parliament. The plenary was convened for its constitutive session after the election of June 6-9.

After a secret ballot vote, 562 members of the new Parliament came out in favour of the reelection of the Maltese lawyer, who first took over the office after her predecessor David Sassoli’s death in January 2022. The European Parliament voting procedures provide the need for an absolute majority of valid votes cast to chair the Parliament.

Metsola can boast the 90.2% of the 623 valid ballots in her favour. No one before her had cashed similar results. The only one to come close, with 555 votes, was the Polish Jerzy Buzek in 2009. In January 2012 the German European deputy Martin Schulz was elected with 387 votes in favour out of the 689 valid ballots. The consensus in his regard raised to 409 “yes” two years and a half later for his reelection. In 2017 the Italian MEP Antonio Tajani took the lead of the chamber just on the second round of vote with 351 in favour out of the 633 valid ballots. His successor David Sassoli obtained just eleven votes more than the 334 needed to be elected as President.

In January 2022 Metsola already gave proof to have support based on a grand coalition as she got 458 votes out of the 690 valid ballots.

“Today I am positioned at the heart of a pro-European and constructive majority, I am proud to be a president who has always worked on alliances and created bridges, and I will continue to do so”, Metsola claimed after being reelected by the new 720-member Parliament. Her acceptance speech was teeming with quotes and references. She mentioned Alcide De Gasperi, one of Europe’s founding fathers and his aphorism about Europe as “one of the constants of history”. She referred to Simon Weil, and Nicole Fontaine, as well as victims of femicide such as the Italian Giulia Cecchettin and the Spanish Ana Vanessa. She remembered the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. “If too many women are still being abused, killed and struggling to claim their rights, we cannot make Europe better”, MEPs were brought to attention. She mentioned the prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino and their sacrifice in the combat against the Mafia. “They would be proud of today’s Europe”, she claimed.

The support from her colleagues, the European People’s Party (EPP) and its allies, the Renew group and the S&D group was taken for granted. Among the Greens, the indication was freedom to vote but, explaining party sources, it is presumed that they largely voted in favour. The Left group presumably voted for Podemos candidate Irene Montero, the only competitor to Metsola’s reelection. She was backed by 61 MEPs.

Metsola also cashed in the preferences of a “large majority” of the Conservative and Reformist group (Ecr), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party comrades included. Former Frontex’s Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri, now standing among the ranks of the new far-right populist group “Patriots for Europe”, confessed that the delegation of his party, the French Rassemblement National, voted in Metsola’s favour. In the same political group members of Lega’s delegation contributed to her reelection, as sources told.

The broad support was the opportunity for Metsola to claim her credibility as a super-partes role. She used the case of her landslide victory to stand as an example of a successful political dialogue. “Polarization in our societies has led to a politics of confrontation and even political violence, the simple answer is to divide us between ‘us and them’ but we need to move beyond this thinking that foments hatred instead of building hope”, she stressed while addressing the chamber.