The European People’s Party and the normalisation of the far-right in the European Parliament after the 2024 elections

The rise of far-right populist and Eurosceptic forces across Europe is increasingly shaping the strategies of centre-right parties: do they hold the centre by sticking to the cordon sanitaire or do they collaborate with far-right parties for vote- and policy-seeking purposes? This question is not unique to domestic parties; since the 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections, the European People's Party (EPP) faces a similar choice. With a distribution of seats making right-wing coalitions a numerical alternative to the ‘grand coalition’, this paper investigates under which conditions the EPP chooses to cooperate with the far-right groups in the EP. We argue that the EPP’s strategy aims to reconcile two apparently incompatible objectives: cooperation with far-right parties in order to take advantage of shifting majorities, while avoiding electoral backlash against legitimising the far-right. The resulting strategy of selective cooperation with the far-right groups depends on three factors. First, the type of policy issue: cooperation is more likely on policy issues rather than constitutive issues, like rule of law. Second, visibility: cooperation is more likely in committee than plenary, in non-legislative rather than legislative files, and in amendments, rather than final votes. Third, the acceptability of the political group: we expect closer cooperation with the ECR than with the Patriots for Europe and the Europe of Sovereign Nations groups. We test our argument with a combination of plenary roll-call votes in the ninth and tenth legislative terms, roll-call votes in plenary and committee in the tenth legislature and elite interviews with EP political groups, The paper shows growing, yet differential, levels of cooperation between the EPP and the far-right, which normalises and legitimises their participation in EP politics.