Brussels, Belgium. Cypriot European Parliament member Geadis Geadi has signed a no-confidence motion against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, due to be voted on by MEPs on Monday.
Signatories and political backing
Geadi, who belongs to Elam, is one of 109 MEPs to have signed the motion. High-profile co-signatories include French far-right leader Jordan Bardella and Greece’s Afroditi Latinopoulou, who leads the far-right Voice of Reason party.
Focus on the EU-Mercosur trade deal
The motion centres its complaints about von der Leyen and her commission on the EU trade deal with the South American trade bloc Mercosur, which is to be signed by von der Leyen in Paraguay on Saturday.
It said the commission has “ignored strong and repeated opposition from several national parliaments, from this parliament, and from European farmers and breeders” and that it “circumvented the political and legal obstacles to ratification it would have faced by splitting the agreement into two separate legal instruments in order to bypass national parliaments”.
The motion also said the trade deal “threatens the future of the European agricultural sector by opening the market to products that do not comply with European environmental, social, animal welfare, and sanitary and phytosanitary standards”. It said this creates “unfair competition that endangers the livelihoods of thousands of European farmers and breeders”.
It added that “the EU-Mercosur agreement is contrary to the interests of the EU and its citizens as it imperils a wide range of agricultural sectors, exposing European farmers, workers and small and medium sized enterprises to unfair competition, asymmetric concessions and strategic dependencies that run counter to the EU’s declared objectives of resilience and autonomy”.
The motion said “the EU and the commission are weaker today than ever due to the persistent failure of [von der Leyen] to listen to our farmers and citizens and to respond to the EU’s most urgent challenges”.
Recent no-confidence votes
The vote will be the fourth no-confidence motion von der Leyen has faced in the last six months, with the most recent two having both taken place on the same day in October last year.
On that occasion, the first motion was put forward by MEPs from the far-right Patriots for Europe group and won the support of 179 MEPs, but was voted down by 378 who supported von der Leyen, short of the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to unseat her.
What do you think the European Parliament vote will mean for the EU-Mercosur trade deal?