(Bloomberg) -- Roberta Metsola won another stint as president of the European Parliament Tuesday as lawmakers prepare to vote later in the week on Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second term as head of the European Union’s executive arm.
Von der Leyen — who like Metsola belongs to the largest EU party, the European People’s Party — faces a tough political test to cobble together at least 361 votes on Thursday in the 720-member parliament. Von der Leyen was confirmed for her last term by the narrowest margin in the EU’s history — and this time, the math may be even trickier.
The European Parliament opened its first session after EU-wide elections last month, where far-right parties gained a larger number of seats. Some of the lawmakers who backed von der Leyen in 2019 for her first term have vowed to oppose her, which means she will have to seek new backers from outside her main coalition.
There had been speculation she might court votes from Giorgia Meloni’s right wing Brothers of Italy, but the Italian prime minister was outraged by the back-room deal between the center-right EPP, the socialists and the liberals that cemented her nomination. Meloni ended up abstaining on von der Leyen’s nomination.
This time, von der Leyen is seeking support from groups like the Greens, which opposed her first term but are now seeking to remain relevant after suffering losses in the election.
For her part, Metsola, 45, won a secret ballot on Tuesday, against Irene Montero, a Spanish member of parliament from the Left political group, giving her another two-and-a-half year term at the helm of the assembly. While the parliament is the weakest of the three major branches of the EU — which include the European Commission and the European Council, which represents its 27 member states — it retains a key role in approving legislation and confirming EU commissioners.
Metsola, a member of Malta’s Nationalist Party, spent much of her first term dealing with the fallout from a bribery scandal, where several lawmakers were detained and later stripped of their immunity from prosecution as part of a Belgian police investigation into a corruption case involving the parliament, Qatar and Morocco.
The investigation into what was dubbed Qatargate has stalled, but it prompted Metsola to propose new rules aimed at shedding more light on the work of lawmakers and their contacts with foreign powers, lobbyists and other outsiders.
The parliament was also a strong voice for holding up funds for Hungary over rule of law concerns. Budapest currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is sparking alarm over his diplomatic outreach to Russia and China.
“People will look to us for direction,” Metsola said before Tuesday’s secret ballot. “Whether it is standing up for our values and the rule of law, or remaining the strong advocate that Ukraine needs.”
Going forward, Metsola promised to make further adjustments in how the parliament works, including trying to prevent the EU’s executive arm from making arbitrary substitutions for hearings of individual commissioners. The parliament will be able to set up special temporary legislative committees to deal with proposals that cross into the responsibilities of several panels, while all legislative proposals with an impact on the EU budget will undergo an independent budgetary assessment.
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