Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
With just two elections left for the year, the mighty states of Chad and Croatia, it seems safe to say this. From London to Dhaka to Washington and now Damascus, where Syria’s 25-year incumbent dictator and former NHS ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad has just been toppled, it’s been a bad year for incumbents. In the month since the FT’s article on 2024’s graveyard of incumbents, a dozen more have since joined.
The government of Mauritius fresh off of negotiating maybe the best trade-deal in history (that is being paid by the UK to receive a territory with which they have no legal entitlement or historic connection) was thrown out, Sri Lanka following its slow running organic-farming catastrophe saw its theoretically incumbent government lose 56 percentage points in its election, and Namibia’s 35 year-long incumbent post-apartheid government achieved its worst result ever despite jailing opposition leaders.
In the West it’s much the same.
In Romania’s since annulled presidential election, a hard-right ex-UN Sustainability Chief, who wasn’t even being included in most polls and where he received only 5%, came from nowhere to emerge as frontrunner.
Ireland was much the same as voters plagued all the homes of Ireland’s three-largest parties in an election campaign decided by gaffes with right-wing populism (or at least something to the right of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail) emerging and overtaking what were the incumbent Greens, since reduced to just one seat.
Iceland too, the centre-right Independence Party who had won every single post-war election (bar the time they caused a flash financial meltdown unprecedented in scale for the developed world) came second and with the lowest share of the vote in history. The other two parties of government, the Progressive Party and the Left-Green Movement, received their worst results in history too with the latter being thrown out of the parliament entirely.
The last eleven months, and that descriptive blitz, all stand in contrast to one thing. That globally there is one incumbent who not just won a convincing re-election but whose performance in that re-election has proven frankly masterful. Who is it? Ursula von der Leyen.
In the months leading up to the European Parliament elections and the months between the election and the installation of a new Commission, the Greens, the Socialists & Democrats, and the liberal Renew Europe, had each told von der Leyen that they would vote down the Commission if there was any cooperation with blocks to the right of her own European People’s Party. At the same time one of said right-wing blocks (Meloni’s) said it would vote down the Commission if it were excluded from it. That catch-22 looked like it could be fatal, it proved to barely be a speedbump.
The Greens hobbled by their disastrous performance in the election whilst desiring to be taken seriously put forward some of the most milquetoast demands possible leaving them placated. The Socialists & Democrats told that if they toppled Meloni’s Commission nominee the centre-right would remove the Socialist nominee for Commission second in command were unhappy but had no risk appetite, and the liberals facing the reality that actually most of their group agreed with the centre-right’s proposals for migration, deregulation, and defence required little more than words.
Meloni too was brought into the fold securing for Italy a Vice-Presidency and the huge cohesion policy role. Even the far-left and far-right groups voted for at least a few of the Commissioners.
Von der Leyen may have only been confirmed by the smallest minority in the Parliament’s history but the coalition she created is unprecedentedly broad, and her personal control of that coalition is astounding with, for the first time since 1999, every single nominee being approved by the Parliament.
That control will only intensify with the collapse of both France and Germany’s governments, and the impending doom creeping over Sanchez’s administration in Spain. Von der Leyen has been left as the only major power player from the broad-centre and will be able to exercise (at least for a while) nearly unprecedented dominance over European-level politics. It’s already being felt.
Not only was the entirety of the College of Commissioners approved but sensing France’s weakness von der Leyen was able to leverage her role in assigning portfolios to Commissioners to force Macron to ditch Thierry Breton, the Europe’s regulatory tsar who had so often gone rogue and attacked her, and instead nominate the ever-compliant Stéphane Séjourné (ex-MEP and ex-European Minister).
Former Belgian Prime Minister and President of the European Council Charles Michel, who had so often quarrelled with von der Leyen on issue after issue, was jettisoned by terms limits too. His replacement, former Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa, though from the centre-left Socialists & Democrats, seems to be both a personal friend of von der Leyen and likely to be highly compliant (not least if he wants re-election in 30 months’ time when the centre-left faction in the European Council will be even smaller with both Scholz and Sanchez likely gone).
In policy terms it’s already happening, you need only look at the EU-MERCOSUR trade deal. France and Poland have both rallied against it yet von der Leyen and Costa look set to be able to turn the screws on Austria (thanks to it having only a caretaker government), the Netherlands (thanks to its unstable semi-technocratic government), and Ireland (given its current post-election haze) meaning that even if Meloni who has ummed-and-ahhhed on the deal were to decide against von der Leyen could still deny Macron’s bloc a blocking minority in the Council (requiring 4 states and 35% of the EU’s population).
The prior humiliation of Europe’s Greens as part of the Commissioner confirmations looks set to spill over into policy as the European Commission is quietly taking a hatchet to the package of corporate sustainability measures adopted in the last term, requiring a spiralling bureaucracy of environmental supply chain disclosures. The burdensome anti-deforestation package that has already been delayed is likely to be watered down too. The Greens approved the Commission because of its support for the European Green Deal, yet it appears to be slowly dying at the Commission’s behest.
Post-Scholz’s departure, and with the re-synchronisation in the politics of Germany and the European Commission, a whole host of other rules could be on the chopping block, in particular the 2035 ban on vehicles with internal combustion engines. Fears of deindustrialisation, particularly with Made in China 2025 culminating at the same time as a Trump trade-war, have created what once felt impossible in Europe. An impulse towards deregulation and dynamism.
How remarkable is it then that at the same time as the rest of Europe races to deregulate and save its industries, the ‘buccaneering free trading low regulation Anglo-Saxon’ economy of Britain is taking the opposite path. In 21 days’ time, for every non-electric car a company sells in the UK above a 72% of sales quota a fine of up to £15,000 per car will be levied. It’s a policy put in place by Boris Johnson and it’s a policy Labour looks set to ramp up by bringing the target year forward again whilst failing to put in place the kind of anti-dumping measures the US and EU have placed on Chinese manufactured cars.
The US under both Biden and Trump is fighting back, the EU despite the efforts of a large minority is gearing up to fight back, whilst the UK is left sandwiched between them doing nothing. If we are to put something in our graveyard then, perhaps it could be our new incumbents and not our old manufacturing.