In this sense, the stakes are reminiscent of when Jacques Santer’s Commission faced a vote of no confidence in 1999. The motion failed, but Santer and his entire team were forced to step down weeks later when the Party of European Socialists formally withdrew its support.
The 2025 version carries faint echoes of those days: A center-left party is furious with the Commission president, and the specter of a scandal hangs over the proceedings.
Guaranteed to fail
But echoes don’t mean history will repeat itself. However angry they may be over von der Leyen’s rightward turn, the leaders of the liberal Renew and center-left Socialists and Democrats groups in the Parliament have both said they will not back the no-confidence motion.
As for Manfred Weber, who leads von der Leyen’s powerful conservative EPP group, he has ordered his lawmakers to be present in the Parliament to show “unanimous” support for the Commission president. Given that the motion needs a two-thirds majority to pass, it’s essentially guaranteed to fail.
Even so, the vote itself carries a powerful warning for von der Leyen.
For one, lawmakers have now learned how easy it is to bring a motion of no confidence. (Just 72 votes are needed.) Because the motion was brought by lawmakers from the populist right, it was easy for centrist parties to dismiss it in order not to abet the far right, whom Weber has called the “puppets of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
But this would not be the case if another disgruntled faction, say S&D or the Greens, decided to bring their own motion of no confidence ― whether triggered by von der Leyen’s unwinding of green targets or some other scandal that has yet to crop up. Getting to a two-thirds majority would still be difficult, but such motions don’t need to pass in order to inflict political damage.
