With Pedro Sánchez and Olaf Scholz as the first swords, the European social democrats launched their campaign this Saturday before the European elections of June 9 with the aim of confronting the rise of the extreme right. At the congress of the European Socialist Party (PES) held in Rome, among militants, MEPs, local representatives and leaders, the social democrats tried to show muscle and stand up to the polls that place them as the second force in the European Parliament behind the Popular Party . The fear is clear: that a growth in far-right formations will push the popular parties into pacts with populist parties.
“The ghosts of the past are again at the doors of our institutions: hatred, greed, falsehoods, climate denialism, authoritarianism. They are equipped with new digital tools and have powerful allies inside and outside Europe – the Spanish president warned at the beginning of the day. But we are going to defeat them like we defeated them in the past,” he promised. Sánchez was able to put aside the internal storms for a few hours to enjoy a great ovation at La Nuvola, the congress space where the event was held in Rome, at a time when the strength of the European socialists in the European Council is increasingly precarious – they have five leaders compared to twelve of the popular ones. “The very soul of Europe is at risk,” he stressed.
The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, warned the same thing, recalling that “the extreme right is growing in practically all our countries”, a “right-wing populism that is campaigning against a united Europe and seeks to undermine our sovereign states.” Scholz returned at the end of the congress after a stop at the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis. The chancellor also pointed out one of his priorities after the elections: the creation of a European defense industry, two years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Other heavyweights such as the Portuguese António Costa and the Danish premier, Mette Frederiksen, also participated. But the protagonist of the day was another much more discreet man, Nicolas Schmit, the 70-year-old Luxembourger who was officially designated as the European Social Democrats’ candidate for the European Commission. The current Commissioner for Employment has very few options to take over a position in which, a priori, Ursula Von der Leyen should repeat without many problems. The real aspirations of the social democrats are found elsewhere, the European Council – currently occupied by the liberal Charles Michel – or retaining the high representative of Foreign Policy, so their role will surely be to prepare the ground for the other positions that they The social democrats do have options to achieve in the next distribution of portfolios.
“I want to send a message to the European PP and the liberals: be consistent with yourselves, remain faithful to your own history, to your European commitment,” Schmit warned, once again warning against the normalization of the extreme right in European institutions. “They have no other project – he pointed out – beyond destroying democracy and the social Europe of all.”
