New European Parliament composition at stake as Italy, Slovakia come aboard

Four days of voting to choose a new European Parliament has passed the halfway mark with Slovakia shaken by an assassination attempt last month on its premier and influential Italy joining in.

Most of the European Union’s 27 member countries, including powerhouses France and Germany, go to the polls on Sunday, the final day, with projected overall results due late that evening.

Slovakia’s voters have rallied to the ruling left-wing Smer-SD party in the wake of the May 15 shooting of Prime Minister Robert Fico, who blamed the attack on the main opposition and its “aggressive and hateful politics”.

Authorities said the assassination attempt, by a 71-year-old poet, was politically motivated.

One voter, Jozef Zahorsky, a 44-year-old teacher, said “it was not easy” but he cast his ballot for Smer because it stood for “the interests of Slovakia, not Brussels”.

Fico’s party opposes EU arms deliveries to Ukraine and rails against alleged “warmongers” in Brussels. Slovakia’s president-elect, Peter Pellegrini, victor in April national polls, is also Ukraine-sceptic.

On Saturday he said the European Union was at a “crossroads”, needing a “new defence policy” and an alternative to a “restrictive” Green transition harming industry and competition.

Italy's Giorgia Meloni

Those positions are shared with many far-right parties in Europe, predicted to make gains in the European Parliament. Surveys suggest they could grab as much as a quarter of the 720 seats, weakening the mainstream groupings expected to still come out on top.

Meloni courted a key indicator as to the make-up of the new parliament will come from Italy, the EU’s third-biggest economy governed by a coalition led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

If, as expected, her party wins, Italy could end up with significant influence over the five-year terms of both the incoming parliament and the next European Commission which will subsequently be put together.

Current commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has been courting Meloni, who along with other EU leaders will decide whether to give her a second mandate or replace her.

Von der Leyen has indicated a willingness to have her European People’s Party work with far-right lawmakers in the parliament, as long as they are pro-EU and not what she calls “puppets” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She explicitly ruled out allying with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Germany’s AfD on those grounds.

Both of those parties unlike Meloni’s are leery of EU military and financial support to Ukraine against Russia, with the AfD outright hostile to weapons deliveries.

In a video message posted on social media Saturday, Meloni said her priorities were to “defend Europe’s borders against illegal immigration (and) protect the real economy and jobs”.