What the Socialists want — and what they’ll get

HELLO. There are 6 days until June 6 and the excitement is palpable. In Brussels, the election is top of mind, and thoughts are already turning to what happens afterwards when the real balance of power will be hammered out. As my colleague Nicholas Vinocur wrote this morning, Ursula von der Leyen’s campaign is faltering — perhaps an inevitable fate for the incumbent Commission president — but it could also be a sign that her European People’s Party has tested the patience of their traditional Socialist partners in Europe too much by looking past them to the far-right.
What the Socialists say they want publicly: Council, Commission, the presidency of the European Parliament, and a big job for their lead candidate Nicolas Schmit. 
What they really want: To stay relevant.
Going well: The Socialists’ biggest strength is that they are pretty much guaranteed to come second in the European Parliament election. They will likely have the second largest group of MEPs after the center-right European People’s Party — and probably by a wider margin than in today’s Parliament. They argue that means the EPP won’t be able to work around them to do deals with the far-right, mathematically speaking. 
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There are positives for the Socialists: Raphaël Glucksmann is shining in France, rescuing the French Socialists from a yearslong slump; they are neck and neck with the center-right in Spain, and second to far-right Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Von der Leyen’s explicit openness to working with Meloni is also proving a boon to the Socialists. 
Not going well: But the Socialists’ biggest weakness is precisely the table of 27 government leaders who will call the shots during the frenzied phone calling, haggling and backstabbing for top jobs that is about to kick off. The Socialists only have five seats there —  Germany, Spain, Romania, Denmark and Malta — compared to the dozen center-right leaders. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez has already endorsed von der Leyen, perhaps weakening his negotiating position, and it is in Scholz’s interest to keep VDL in place, or he has to accept his coalition partners the Greens proposing a commissioner — who’d get a much weaker role. What can they bargain from that position? 
Saving the Green Deal: The Socialists are likely to claim the second 2.5-year Parliament president term for one of their own (names like Iratxe García and Katarina Barley circulate), try to clinch the European Council for someone like former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa — if he can be rehabilitated — and focus their efforts on painting Socialist policies like jobs and the Green Deal into the next EU policy plans. 
The big question Socialists can’t answer: Von der Leyen has been explicit now that she wants to get re-elected thanks to Meloni’s MEPs, whether that’s a negotiating stance or a real straight-up plan. The Socialists are being far more coy about whether they’ll actually blow-up the vote on the next Commission president. My take: It’s all still to play for, and it depends on what priorities the Socialists can say they’ve managed to etch into the policy agenda. 
Schmit fires up the blast furnace: Schmit’s campaign is now humming along, with the Luxembourger taking more direct potshots at von der Leyen, upping the ante on the EPP, having refrained from criticizing her earlier on. In Brussels on Wednesday night, he made the starkest comments yet about the EPP’s strategy of courting Meloni, which he said was a double-edged plan to work around the Socialists and do away with progressive policies.
History lessons: “This is a dangerous game because it is for Europe a destructive game and this has to be blocked,” he told a crowd of Spanish expats at Atelier29. “History repeats, and this happened in European history and that’s why it’s so important to say ‘No, there’s no way to do anything with the extreme right,’” said the man who kicked off his campaign talking about his father being killed in World War II.
A la carte policies: The next day at a lunch with journos in Paris, including my colleague Giorgio Leali, Schmit launched into an attack on his Commission boss over her aloof management style, and countered critical pieces in POLITICO that he was more of a running-mate than a rival to von der Leyen, as he ate an apple tartelette. (According to Giorgio he ate the apples but left the tartelette itself.) 
Schmit’s definitely unbiased advice: EPP-led governments should nominate Socialist commissioners to “rebalance” the EU power structures, Schmit told Euractiv this week. Who could he be thinking of? It does raise an interesting question about whether tiny EPP-liberal-run Luxembourg would be willing to forgo party loyalties and put Schmit forward in exchange for a bigger portfolio that Schmit could nab.
Dates for your diary: Barbara Moens and I have this handy guide to the weeks following the election, and how the negotiations for the four top jobs will shake out. It’s gonna be real. 
Can she get to 361? 
After being nominated by the European Council, the Commission president-in-waiting — Ursula von der Leyen? — needs the backing of a majority of lawmakers in the European Parliament to be elected.
The next Parliament will have 720 MEPs, which means the wannabe Commission president will need 361 lawmakers to back them — regardless of how many MEPs decide to abstain or skip the vote. Last time around she only made it by 9 votes, and even if the grand coalition today looks like it has enough votes, remember that not all those votes are guaranteed in the secret ballot.
And while von der Leyen has opened the door to parts of European Conservatives and Reformists (which counts Giorgia Melon’s Brothers of Italy as a member) — a signal that she’s courting their votes — a lot could change before a vote is held, possibly in mid-July.
POLITICO Poll of Polls’ May 29 seat projection for the next European Parliament, and possible coalitions that could get a candidate Commission president majority support — or not — without accounting for new, unaffiliated parties.
`By now, von der Leyen knows that it’s good to have some margin for maneuver.
Last time around, she needed 374 lawmakers to support her. She met that threshold — but just barely — with the approval of 383 MEPs, even though the combined backing of the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, and the Renew Europe group could have won her more than 440 votes.
Fear of Russia overshadows EU vote
The European election may be dominating the agenda in Brussels but in Europe’s eastern borderlands, voters said their focus was firmly on their short-term security and few were aware the election was even happening. 
In the small Estonian town of Võru, the deputy mayor, Sixten Sild, said: “Interest in the EU election is pretty low. There will be election posters here in town, but people here aren’t excited about it.”
More than two years into Russia’s attack on Ukraine, there is a broad appreciation among locals in Europe’s eastern reaches that the threat from their giant neighbor is real, justifying an intensification of defensive measures in this border zone. 
If Moscow does launch an attack on NATO, many experts believe the Baltic states or Suwałki — a strategically located Polish town between Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad and its ally Belarus — would be the first targets.
“They say we should have petrol in our cars all the time in case we need to flee, and I try to have that,” said one 33-year-old Võru resident who asked not to be named. “But I have grandparents here, I have friends here, I have everything here – how can I just go?”
Just south of Võru, over the Latvian border in the town of Alūksne, 40-year-old office administrator Liva Bulina said she had taken a step back from reading every twist and turn of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. 
She said constant reminders of the threat were all around her without her seeking out more. 
“You see the army trucks and you hear the military aircraft and you feel this pressure on you,” she said. “It’s heavy.”
In Suwałki, the administrative center of northeastern Poland, there was a similar bubbling of concern, though locals like Alina Romanowska were far less worried about the possibility of a Russian invasion.
“Sure there is fear somewhere, in the head … even if a person doesn’t try to think about it, but somewhere a light goes on that it could be dangerous, because Russia and Belarus are so close,” said the recently retired financial advisor.
Far from Brussels 
Just weeks out from the European elections, Brussels felt a long way from Estonia’s east. 
Sild said he expected posters for the Estonian candidates to go up soon but that the campaigning was likely to be muted and voters widely disinterested because they felt that the outcome of the vote would be unlikely to have a dramatic impact on their lives. 
National leaders have also been checking in. 
In late April, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas visited the Luhamaa border post to discuss security there before moving on to a meeting with citizens at the Võru Culture House.
Local media reported that discussions became heated as a number of attendees raised the expansion of the military training area near Võru and said it made them a target for Russian forces, at the same time as the government had left them vulnerable through a lack of air defenses. 
by Charlie Duxbury and Bartosz Brzeziński
Charlie and Bartosz’s full story will be published soon.
CAMPAIGN CALENDAR: 
— Today, Nicolas Schmit is campaigning in Paris and will speak at an event with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and Raphaël Glucksmann. He then moves on to Aix-en-Provence and Arles before flying to Porto and then back to Brussels.
— Ursula von der Leyen is in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Saturday and then goes to Plovidv, Bulgaria. Next week it’s Stockholm, Helsinki, and Porto.
— Top Greens Terry Reintke and Bas Eickhout will be at climate marches in Berlin and Amsterdam, respectively. On Monday, Reintke will be in Dresden and will visit a mine in Poland.
— The Left’s Walter Baier is focusing his campaign this week on Spain.
Hello kids: Von der Leyen has been sporting a campaign hoodie in a bid to hand out campaign nick-nacks, the Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin pointed out, pithily noting that Jacques Delors probably never wore “merch.” It’s got to be better than Manfred Weber’s urine-sounding campaign slogan from 2019, “The power of WE.” 
Commission officials quit Brussels en masse: Some EU countries don’t allow voting by post, so that means voters have to physically turn up at polling booths. Hundreds of European Commission officials who work in Brussels and hail from the Czech Republic, Malta, Ireland and Slovakia will thus be traipsing home to vote in the coming days. I bumped into a Maltese official this week who told me he was planning to return to vote.
POLITICO’s Leyla Aksu has made another playlist of songs to get you in the mood for the election. This week’s has some top tunes from Estonia and Latvia. Here it is. Enjoy.
MEP trivia:  Can you name a former president of the European Parliament who managed to break the unwritten rule that you should not have two back-to-back 2.5-year terms? Answers by email only please.
Last week I asked you to name an EU country (other than the Netherlands) where a liberal party has governed with the far-right or been propped up by them.
Congratulations to Bernat Graell Artigas of BCW, who pointed out that the Sweden Democrats support the current government, and to Klaas Johan Osinga, who said there have been all sorts of Italian coalitions.
Casual reminder: We’re also on WhatsApp! Follow our account here to stay up to date on the latest European election news in between Playbook editions.
Send in your campaign posters! Eddy’s building an online collection of EU election campaign posters around the Continent. Please send him your posters if you spot some on your travels.
Podcast — Why it matters: After all the campaign machinations come the policy negotiations. This week’s EU Confidential podcast features a rare behind-the-scenes debrief from POLITICO’s top policy editors. Will the green transition lose out to defense spending? What about medicine prices and tech rules? Listen to the insiders’ take here.
Want more policy? It’s part of the POLITICO Pro Connect “In Conversation with” series, which you can learn more about here.
Want more politics? We’ll be recording a special livestream edition of EU Confidential on Sunday, June 9 starting at 8:30 p.m. as the EU election results roll in. Register here to watch live!
Leftwing lit: A cheeky PES staffer asked Nicolas Schmit and PSOE lead candidate Teresa Ribera what they have been reading on Wednesday. Ribera said she was reading “Mission Economy” by famous economist Mariana Mazzucato. Schmit said he had just finished “La Revolution Obligée”, a book on the geopolitics of the Green Deal. 
EU top jobs reader contest: This morning POLITICO launched a competition to identify the Nostradamus of the EU. Think you can predict who’ll get all the top jobs at the EU and NATO in the months ahead? Enter here for the chance to win a prize, plus bragging rights among your fellow political bubble nerds. 
Current election excitement level: Oh my God it’s here. Help!
Last word: “I think collegiality is important, political debate is important, we are politicians, we are not super-technocrats who are there to manage their own affairs,” Nicolas Schmit told a group of reporters over lunch at a Parisian restaurant on Thursday.
THANKS TO: Hanne Cokelaere, Giorgio Leali, Helen Collis and Paul Dallison.
**A message from Impact Europe: The Impact Manifesto calls on EU policymakers to put impact at the centre of EU policies. Only 15% of Sustainable Development Goals are on track, and the urgency to act against climate change and rising inequalities has never been more acute. Key initiatives for people and planet – like a just transition to a green economy – can’t happen unless impact investors step up. The Investing for Impact Manifesto offers concrete policy actions to enable the work of impact investors and accelerate the transition to a more innovative, sustainable and inclusive economy. Read and endorse the Impact Manifesto.**
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