EU Militant Democracy: Remapping the European Parliament Agenda-Setting and Veto Power Prerogatives

Hungary and Poland have made it clear that a Member State (MS) can maintain its membership in the European Union (EU) while breaching the core values of the EU itself, and that the EU is not able to defend those values (Müller, 2018). The only institution actively involved in contrasting democratic erosion in the EU arena seems to be the European Parliament (EP) (Feisel, 2020). Despite its arguably modest procedural leverage in the EU governance, there is no doubt that the EP’s influence has significantly increased in the last four decades (Kreppel, 2002). During the same period of time, the presence of populist parties has constantly grown in the assembly, until the 2019 EU Election, when their share of votes reached unprecedented levels (Balnaves, et al., 2020). The paper explores the EU response to democratic backsliding within its member states, particularly focusing on the EP as the primary institution actively countering democratic erosion. It investigates whether the EP, following the 2019 European elections marked by the rise of populist parties, adopted a militant democracy approach, aiming to marginalize those seen as undermining liberal democratic institutions. In order to test whether the populist parties electoral success in many EU member states impacted the EP’s influence as an agenda-setter and/or veto player in the appointment of responsibility posts in terms of militant democracy, I’m going to put forward two hypotheses: H1: The more the presence of populist MEPs increased in the EP, the more the EP exerted its agenda-setting power in the composition of EP Committees and in the appointment of responsibility posts in the assembly. H2: The more the presence of populist MEPs increased in the EP, the more the EP stretched its veto-player prerogatives in the appointment of Commissioners. In order to draw a comparative analysis, I will include in my analysis data related to the committee compositions, the appointments of Committee Chairs, Vice Chairs, Vice-Presidents, and Quaestors and Commissioners in the 6th, the 8th, and the 9th parliamentary terms. The choice behind selecting these electoral rounds is purely due to the change in parliamentary compositions in member states over those 15 years. While populist parties were relatively marginal in 2004, from 2014 onwards, the electoral success of populist parties has become a central phenomenon in European politics. Excluding the 7th parliamentary term, which can be viewed as a hybrid and transitional period where populist parties were consolidating power, I chose to compare data from 2004, 2014, and 2019. This approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the European Parliament's response to the populist phenomenon and helps assess the extent to which the electoral success of populist parties influences the policymaking dynamics within the EP.