Publication details
The European Parliament and the Conference on the Future of Europe : Between Ownership and Diverging Political Visions
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) represented an ‘opportunity structure’ for the European Parliament (EP) to advance its own power objectives. The aim of this chapter is to disaggregate this institutional position and examine the EP’s involvement in the CoFoE from the perspective of its constituent parts – European political groups. Through qualitative content analysis of various documents and an analysis of voting behaviour, this study challenges the EP’s unitary position on CoFoE. The chapter contends that the unitary position was only surface-deep, with the Conference being subject to contestation by right-wing Eurosceptic political groups. While integrationist groups (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew Europe (Renew), European People’s Party (EPP), Greens–European Free Alliance (Greens–EFA)) and partly the Left spearheaded by Guy Verhofstadt, utilised the CoFoE to gain more powers for the EP and launch a treaty change procedure, right-wing Eurosceptic groups (European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID)) were (self)-excluded from this process. They also viewed the Conference as an ‘opportunity structure’ but to promote their ‘Eurorealist’ vision of a confederal Europe in which national parliaments play a crucial role. The chapter also delves into the contestation within the political groups revealing the relative incoherence of stances within the integrationist groups, and the Left. |