European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen comfortably survived a vote of no confidence on Thursday, as an awesome variety of European Union lawmakers rejected a censure movement in opposition to her.
The movement contained a mixture of allegations in opposition to von der Leyen, together with textual content messaging privately with the chief govt of vaccine maker Pfizer in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, misuse of EU funds and interference in elections in Germany and Romania.
The movement was defeated in a 360-175 vote in opposition to it, with 18 lawmakers selecting to abstain throughout a plenary session on the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Von der Leyen wasn’t current for the vote.
The vote has been a lightning rod for criticism of Von der Leyen — who led the EU drive to search out vaccines for round 450 million residents in the course of the pandemic — and her European Folks’s Celebration, or EPP, which is the most important political household within the meeting.
They’re accused of cozying as much as the exhausting proper to push by their agenda. The EU parliament shifted perceptibly to the political proper after Europe-wide elections a 12 months in the past.
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“We gained’t vote with the far-right and we don’t help this movement. This vote was little greater than a far-right PR stunt from Putin-loving populists,” Greens group President Terry Reintke stated in an announcement after the ballot, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Nevertheless, she added: “We’re able to construct pro-European majorities, however we won’t be performed by the EPP of their determined deregulation agenda and their want to constantly kind anti-European majorities with the far-right.”
The censure movement, the primary on the European Parliament in over a decade, was introduced in opposition to the European Fee president by a bunch of hard-right lawmakers.
On the eve of the vote, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated on Fb that it might “be the second of reality: on one facet the imperial elite in Brussels, on the opposite patriots and customary sense. There isn’t a getting out of it, it’s important to select.”
He posted: “Madam President, the essence of management is duty. Time to go!” Von der Leyen’s fee has regularly clashed with Orbán over his staunchly nationalist authorities’s strikes to roll again democracy. The European Fee has frozen Hungary’s entry to billions of euros in EU funds.
The second greatest group, the Socialists and Democrats, has stated that the censure movement was a consequence “of the EPP’s irresponsibility and the double video games.”
Throughout debate on Monday, S&D chief Iratxe García Pérez stated to the EPP: “Who do you wish to govern with? Do you wish to govern with people who wish to destroy Europe, or these of us who struggle each day to construct it?”
The EPP has notably labored with the exhausting proper to repair the agenda for listening to von der Leyen’s new commissioners after they had been questioned for his or her suitability for his or her posts final 12 months, and to reject an ethics physique meant to fight corruption.
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