Forward of no-confidence vote, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen says adversaries peddling conspiracies

She stated it was aimed toward “polarising society, eroding belief in democracy, with false claims about election meddling, making an attempt to rewrite the historical past (of) how a profitable Europe overcame the pandemic collectively”.

The censure movement is one other signal of discontent with the previous German defence minister and her backers.

Von der Leyen hails from the European Individuals’s Celebration (EPP), a political household uniting conservative events throughout the 27-nation bloc and the most important group within the meeting.

Different pro-European centrist teams took goal on the EPP for working with hard-right events to seal offers.

The second greatest political group, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), stated the censure movement is a consequence “of the EPP’s irresponsibility and the double video games”.

Trying to the EPP, S&D chief Iratxe García Pérez stated: “Who do you need to govern with? Do you need to govern with those who need to destroy Europe, or these of us who battle day-after-day to construct it?” She stated, nonetheless, that her group wouldn’t vote in opposition to von der Leyen.

The EPP has notably labored with the laborious 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 that was meant to be arrange after a corruption scandal in 2022 linked to Qatar.

Referring to the laborious proper, Dutch senior Greens lawmaker Bas Eickhout stated to the EPP: “You’re feeding that beast, and at a sure second, the beast will eat you.”

The specter of a parliamentary censure movement in 1999 pressured the European Fee — led on the time by Jacques Santer from Luxembourg — to resign over fraud, mismanagement and nepotism allegations.