The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)

Politics, parties and policies

Martin Steven

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526139160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) are now established as one of the larger groups in the European Parliament and from 2014 to 2019 had more MEPs than the Liberals, Greens or radical left and right-wing factions. Despite this, ECR has so far been largely dismissed by political scientists, journalists and Brussels policy-makers as merely another Euro-sceptic faction. Representing the first major study of the political activities of ECR and its 'Euro-realist' agenda, this book argues that ECR ought to be recognised as the main voice for Conservatism in Strasbourg, promoting 'Anglosphere' free market values and the role of NATO in international relations.The book begins with an examination of the origins and early development of ECR, when British Conservative leader David Cameron established the group in a Euro-sceptic gesture to his party. Cameron failed, however, to see the isolating long-term consequences of withdrawing his MEPs from the powerful European People's Party (EPP).Other chapters examine the role of ECR member parties in its development and profile – including Law and Justice (PiS) from Poland, the Czech Civic Democrats (ODS), the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and the Danish People's Party (DF). Drawing on interviews with MEPs and other key figures, the book concludes with an analysis of the leadership and policy activities of ECR politicians in Brussels and Strasbourg in an attempt to measure influence.

1
The European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group

No matter from which direction it is analysed, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament (EP) defies neat categorisation. It has only recently completed its first full parliamentary term, yet has ownership of one of the oldest and most recognisable political ideologies in the world – conservatism. Its leaders claim to be part of ‘Europe's fastest growing political movement’ (Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe 2019), yet their ranks are made up of a rather eclectic mixture of solitary Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It has as yet few concrete policy achievements to its name in European affairs, but has also unquestionably played a role in helping to disrupt the grand coalition between the European People's Party (EPP) and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Its origins and development can be linked back to the start of Brexit – Britain exiting the European Union (EU) – yet have been largely ignored by British political scientists. Even ECR's very name could be interpreted as a contradiction in terms – conservative yet reforming.

This monograph is the first in-depth academic study of ECR. The group has been broadly dismissed by political scientists as merely a short-term strategy by the British Conservatives, fuelled ultimately by Euroscepticism and nationalism (Bale 2006; Whitaker and Lynch 2014), with the resulting scholarly literature extremely limited. The study provides an overview of the group's history, member parties and policy activities, especially in the eighth session of the European Parliament – 2014 to 2019 – when its MEPs held the potential to act as ‘kingmakers’ due to their increased numbers as the third largest grouping. What type of factors were involved in ECR being set up? Who are the key actors in relation to the way it functions? And how successful are its politicians with regard to achieving their key aims and objectives? A detailed understanding of ECR is useful for many reasons: the group is the most visible vehicle for the values of conservatism in the European Union and represents a substantial cross-section of right-of-centre public opinion in European countries.

As different parts of this book will outline, it is too simplistic to characterise the European Conservatives and Reformists as merely another right-wing Eurosceptic party, broadly comparable with the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group led by Nigel Farage, the prominent UK Independence Party MEP, in cooperation with Italian Five Star Movement politicians. ECR's conservatism may be inextricably linked to its aim of reforming the EU, but many ECR politicians would be disappointed with the premise of their grouping being discussed solely in relation to Euroscepticism, nationalism or populism. Instead, they prefer the term ‘Euro-realist’, and protest that they merely want to improve the European Union for the better, not abandon it or reject it altogether. As ECR's formal summary on the European Parliament introductory web page puts it, ‘ECR believes that the EU has a role to play in the twenty-first century but it should focus on delivering cooperation between its member countries, and finding practical solutions to problems and challenges of the 2050s, not of the 1950s’ (European Parliament 2017).

ECR's claim to be a type of ‘honest friend’ to the EU may require a bit of testing, and it can also be conceded that Euro-realism is, at the very least, a variant of ‘soft’ Euroscepticism (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Steven 2016). Nevertheless, the group's wider political activities point to it having longer-term ambitions that go beyond merely acting as a vehicle for disaffected right-wing British Eurosceptics. In particular, it can be argued that ECR's conservative political identity – in favour of free-market economics and a small state – is actually its overarching raison d’être, enabling it to have a truly distinctive voice in the European Parliament for a decade. According to ECR, the EU ‘needs new policies to modernise the economy so its industries and business can be competitive in the global marketplace. It needs reform so it is able to generate jobs and prosperity in the century ahead’ (European Conservatives and Reformists 2018a). Moreover, the differences between ‘Anglosphere’ or ‘Atlanticist’ conservatism and Western European Christian democracy in everyday party politics have been significantly magnified by the creation of ECR, making some of the older theoretical discussions surrounding the conservative nature of Christian democracy perhaps now in need of some updating (Mair and Mudde 1998).

It has been said that the first stage of understanding something is to label it correctly, and in the case of political scientists this can be applied directly to political parties. Ultimately, this monograph is an attempt to provide an accurate and original analysis of the historic development and key contemporary activities of the European Conservatives and Reformists, taking into account the methodological difficulties associated with doing so. After all, political ideologies can become blurred at the edges, and political parties can span different value systems. A Green politician's left-of-centre approach to government essentially arises out his or her environmental concerns – only governments can truly prevent big business and industry from causing widespread pollution, it is argued – and there can be said to be a similar relationship between conservatives and the cause of European reform (Green Party 2019). Broadly, an ECR politician's conservatism motivates him or her to call for a looser association of European states free to trade with each other, and move away from a large, centralised European state based in Brussels. This is an intellectually consistent position to adopt, but it also allows ECR to place a distinctive emphasis on different parts of its policy programme, depending on the context.

Leaving ideological ambiguities aside for one moment, the European Conservatives and Reformists’ success at building a sustainable coalition between political parties from across the EU also ought to be discussed in more depth by European political scientists. Correctly locating ECR on a ‘Left–Right’ or ‘pro-European–Eurosceptic’ spectrum is important, but recognising the group's influence in parliamentary policymaking is also a central objective of the book. In particular, the way ECR grew after being created in 2009 to overtaking long-standing mid-sized groups like the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) in 2014 is impressive. ALDE, for example, was founded in 1976 in Stuttgart and has played an important role since then in cooperating closely with EPP and S&D in Strasbourg. At the very least, then, ECR's growth demonstrates an ability to reach out to quite a diverse range of European parties and politicians after votes in the European Parliament elections are counted.

The 2014 European Parliament elections had been the first to involve party candidates representing ECR since the group was established after the previous elections in 2009. As has already been mentioned, ECR performed strongly in 2014, going on after talks to become the third largest EP group behind EPP and S&D – and ahead of ALDE and EFA. With seventy-seven Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the Brussels and Strasbourg hemicycles, ECR is now a political party with which both EPP and S&D have cooperated extensively in the 2014–19 parliamentary term. ALDE was the ‘kingmaker’ of the seventh European Parliament (EP7) as the third largest group, and ECR potentially held the same influence in the eighth Parliament (EP8) given the number of MEPs which now represented it. Indeed, some leading ECR politicians even claim to have gone further in some ways than ALDE and helped to achieve a reconfiguration of the long-standing grand coalition between EPP and S&D (Kamall 2017; Zahradil 2017).

By the end of the 2014–19 parliamentary session the group was made up of twenty-six parties from eighteen different EU member states. Many of these came from Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) where, as in the United Kingdom, Christian democracy has tended to have had less of a presence in government. Meanwhile its larger registered transnational party federation, or ‘Europarty’, the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE),¹ counted as its members parties from countries outside the European Union such as Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. Formal links were also established with partner parties further afield such as the Australian Liberals, the Canadian Conservatives, and the Republicans in the United States. Many of ECR's member parties have been at the heart of prominent aspects of EU affairs for some time, from the attempts by Law and Justice (PiS) to ‘reform’ the Polish political system to the efforts by the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) to cope with terrorist threats in Belgium and beyond. Alternative for Germany (AfD) was also a member party before being expelled for moving towards a radical right position.

As Table 1.1 shows, the British Conservatives had the largest number of MEPs in ECR from 2014 to 2019 with eighteen out of seventy-seven seats, and had been the foundation for the party since David Cameron formally promised to leave EPP in 2005 during his leadership campaign (Lynch and Whitaker 2007). Law and Justice – the governing party of Poland between 2005 and 2007, and once more since October 2015 – had fourteen seats, while the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) from the Czech Republic, ...