The EU Parliament rejects the motion of no confidence in von der Leyen: FdI does not participate, Ursula's majority is in trouble.
The vote in Strasbourg
As was widely expected, given the numbers in the European Parliament , on Thursday the European Parliament rejected the motion of censure against the European Commission and its President Ursula von der Leyen.
Of the 553 MEPs present, 360 voted against, 175 in favor, and only 18 abstained . A motion of no confidence required a two-thirds majority, meaning at least 480 MEPs out of 719, but the 360 votes against are still fewer than the 401 that elected von der Leyen a year ago. It was clear that there was no chance of a favorable vote; it's no coincidence that von der Leyen herself was absent from the Strasbourg chamber during the vote: she is in Rome for the conference on Ukraine's recovery organized by the Italian government.
The motion was presented by Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea , from the far-right party Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which is part of ECR, the Conservatives and Reformists group in which the elected representatives of the Brothers of Italy party sit .
ECR Group which paradoxically was deeply split by the outcome of the vote: the Melonian MEPs, who despite not being part of the Ursula majority I express with Raffaele Fitto one of the vice-presidents, chose not to participate in the vote , while the remaining part of the group, from the Romanians of AUR to the Poles of PiS, Law and Justice, voted in favour of the motion together with the Patriots and Europe of Sovereign Nations , the other two far-right groups present in Strasbourg, the left of Left and the 5 Star Movement .
The Socialists and Democrats (S&D), whose largest component is the Italian Democratic Party (PD), after days of debating whether to abstain, ultimately chose to vote against the motion, along with the People's Party and the liberal Renew party , the other two components of the majority. Among the Socialists, about thirty elected representatives did not vote, including the seven Italians Benifei, Gori, Gualmini, Ricci, Strada, Tarquinio, and Zan.
This was not an easy decision given the von der Leyen Commission's progressive shift to the right , from migrants to the Green Deal , especially due to pressure from the People's Party: in many elections, the EPP had no problem voting alongside the various far-right groups present in the European Parliament.
The motion of no confidence, which had not been voted on in Parliament since 2014, was brought about by the so-called " Pfizergate ", or rather the ways in which in 2021 der Leyen directly negotiated with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla , even exchanging text messages with him, the supply of approximately 1.8 billion doses of the vaccine against Covid-19,
Those messages became the subject of journalistic investigations, with several newspapers asking Brussels to see them. However, the Commission refused to make them public, saying they were untraceable, without specifying how they had disappeared. The New York Times sued, and in May this year the General Court of the European Union ruled in favor of the American newspaper. This prompted far-right groups to file a motion of censure against von der Leyen.
l'Unità
