The European Conservatives and Reformists Group: Cooperation or Opposition in Europe’s Parliament?

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group has emerged as an important player in European Parliament (EP) decision-making. Drawing on about 1,300 EP plenary votes from July 2019 to June 2022, we demonstrate that the ECR group has played an active and often cooperative role in the politics of the EP, albeit not in the policy areas where its national conservative and soft Eurosceptic ideology comes to prominence, such as women’s rights or institutional affairs. We complement the quantitative analysis with an in-depth investigation of the group’s position on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Our investigation shows that the ECR group’s unified stance against migration has often failed to translate into cohesive legislative actions by its national party delegations, aligning instead with national interests as defined by these parties.
Keywords: European Conservatives and Reformists; New Pact on Migration and Asylum; radical right; European Parliament; National Conservatism