The re-election of Donald Trump, reinforcing uncertainty about European defence, could give new impetus to CSDP instruments in the coming years. At the same time, the number of far-right MEPs in the EP is increasing. There is an assumption that these parties are fundamentally critical of a deepening of European integration in the area of security and defence as they see the sovereignty of their member states at risk and are fundamentally opposed to an increasing supranationalisation within this area. With the steadily increasing role of the EP regarding CSDP financing instruments, this begs the question: How certain is support and development of CSDP instruments in the future?
An exploratory analysis of the voting behaviour of the ECR Group, the ID Group and the non-aligned Fidesz Party (now PfE) in the last EP legislature shows that there are some clear differences in support for CSDP instruments both between and within political groups.
The majority of members of the ECR Group supported the votes on PESCO, ASAP, the Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) or the Strategic Compass. However, VOX (now PfE) and others abstained or voted against. Even the constructive voting PiS delegation abstained from the vote on the RDC. The picture becomes even more heterogeneous when looking at the delegations of the former ID group. While Lega is consistently in favour of the instruments under consideration, the majority of other national delegations typically either abstain or reject them. The puzzle of this exploratory analysis, however, is the voting behaviour of the typically obstructive Rassemblement National and FPÖ, which softened their negative stance in the vote on ASAP and even turned it into approval for the vote on the strategic compass. Another question that has yet to be answered is why Fidesz, which often adopts an even more obstructive stance, voted unanimously for instruments such as ASAP or the Strategic Compass.
The existing literature does not yet provide a clear picture of why some of these parties are in favour of certain instruments and others are not. Thus, the aim of this paper is threefold: First, to systematically analyse the approval of existing CSDP instruments (EPF, EDF, ASAP, EDIRPA) this paper, which is still to be written, wants to answer the question: What is the level of support from the various far-right parties for the different instruments? Secondly, it wants to answer what reasons MEPs give for their agreement or disagreement? On the basis of the answers to these questions, this paper will, thirdly, seek to develop a systematisation according to which far-right parties argue for or against the support of CSDP instruments. To this end, this paper first analyses all roll-call votes in the last two European Parliament legislative periods (2014-2019 & 2019-2024) dealing with the above-mentioned instruments. On the basis of these findings, interviews are then conducted with at least 5 MEPs per far-right political group (ECR, PfE, ESN) from at least 3 different national delegations per political group in order to identify the underlying motivations.
