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 situation 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. By combining 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, we argue that cooperation with the far-right groups depends on three factors: first, the type of policy issue – namely, cooperation being more recurrent on policy rather than constitutive issues like rule of law; second, visibility, meaning that cooperation is more likely in committee than plenary, in non-legislative rather than legislative files and in amendments rather than final votes; and third, on the acceptability of the political group, which would show closer ties with the ECR than with the Patriots for Europe and the Europe of Sovereign Nations groups. The paper shows the growing levels of cooperation between the EPP and the far-right, which normalises and legitimises their participation in EP politics.