EU Analytics – January 2026 review: The unpredictability of a shifting EU political landscape

By Nicolai von Ondarza

The EP vote on the Mercosur agreement was won by a “horseshoe majority”, the like of which had never been seen in the European Parliament before.

2026 continues to be a defining year for European and international politics. At the same time, below the surface of upheavals, institutions following their regular pace can be positively boring. The EU institutions in January were almost in that category: Next to the reactions to US threats on Greenland (including an emergency European Council that happened when the threat was already somewhat diffused), we had a regularly EP plenary and just a few Council votes.

But at least the EP plenary also showed the unpredictability of current EU politics – on the one hand, after several months of more and more of the centre-right to far-right “Venezuela majority”, there was a swing back to the centrist “von der Leyen” majority. But on the other hand, on the Mercosur trade agreement, we had both one of the smallest margins in a QMV vote ever, and a new “horseshoe majority” of the far left, Greens and far right referring the agreement to the European Court of Justice. Time to dive in:

Highlight of the month: EP vote on referring the Mercosur Trade Agreement to the ECJ

The most contested vote of the month was certainly the EP vote on referring the Mercosur Trade Agreement to the ECJ (full data at HowTheyVote.EU). The vote was technically a resolution, but with potential far-reaching consequences. With a slim majority of 334 to 324, the EP decides to refer the Mercosur Trade Agreement – signed in January after more than 20 years of negotiations and an equally tight Council vote (see below) – to the European Court of Justice.

The vote was important for two reasons: First, the EP will have to ratify the agreement later this year, and this shows the majority for it is at best insecure. Second, a case before the ECJ will likely take 18-24 months, which could significantly postpone the application of the agreement. Once the first Mercosur country ratifies, the Commission nevertheless has the legal option to propose provisional application. Strong proponents of the trade agreement with Mercosur, like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have called for the Commission to do so. Chatter in the Brussels bubble is that there could be a symbolical vote in the EP to diffuse accusations of ignoring the parliament, but EP consent is not required for provisional application.

A “horseshoe majority”

The vote itself was also remarkable for several reasons. To start, and this really shows the changing political landscape of the EU, this was the only vote I could find since at least 2019 in which a majority was formed without any of the “main” parties of EU politics, the EPP, S&D or the Liberals, supporting it by the majority of their members. There were of course rebels amongst all three of them, but never before in recent data could the fringes form such a majority.

The majority itself was also remarkable. I call it a “horseshoe majority”, with the far-left and far-right fringes meeting each other in their rejection of liberal EU trade policy. Add in the Greens and many rebels from the centre, and the voting looks unlike anything I have seen in the EP so far. The German Greens got a lot of criticism for it, in particular in the German right-leaning press. “And gone is the firewall” (“Und weg ist die Brandmauer”) was the title of the FAZ, arguing that here the Greens, who always accused the CDU/CSU (EPP) of working with the far right, now voted with the far left and the AfD (ESN) to stop the Mercosur agreement. Personally, I think there is a point to this argument, though the “horseshoe majority” to me was much more the result of a political accident rather than a coordinated vote, as we have seen with the EPP and the far right.

Source: Own calculation based on voting data from HowTheyVote.EU.

Finally, this was also a vote that showed that, on major political issues, national politics can still trump party-political lines in the EP. For instance, all French MEPs and all Polish MEPs, regardless of their party groups, voted for the referral: two countries in which the Mercosur trade agreement is universally rejected, and whose governments also voted against it in the Council. Taken together, all three aspects led to a vote where the centre certainly did not hold in EU politics.

Final votes in the European Parliament

In January 2026, the EP had one major plenary session, from 19-22 January. In terms of the votes, the plenary session had 22 votes recorded at HowTheyVote.EU. On those, I already wrote a flash analysis with a look at who won the votes, the coalitions, where the far right mattered, and on the group coherence. This will therefore be a shorter cross-cutting look.

First, the data shows that after the far right became more and more influential while the “von der Leyen” platform was fighting itself, January saw a reversal of this trend. My educated guess is that this is a combination of (a) the issues voted on and (b) the EPP, S&D and Renew wanting to show that they can still work with each other. Here is a graph showing how often the three parties of the centre-left and centre-right voted together, and how often the three parties of the far right (ECR, PfE and ESN) voted together. You can clearly see a rise in the latter and fall in the former during the second half of 2025, and now a snap back in January 2026:

Source: Own calculation based on voting data from HowTheyVote.EU.

Still, this does not mean that the Venezuela majority is gone – with more votes on simplification/deregulation as well as migration coming up, I expect it to rise again in the coming months. But for now, this shows that the “von der Leyen” majority can, if the political will is there, still be the defining force in the EP.

In January, the EPP has cooperated with the centre-left again

The second bit worth zooming in is the EPP itself. Here is an (admittedly hard to read) graph showing how often the EPP votes together with each of the other groups. After successive falls in the overlap with its partners from the S&D and Renew, January 2026 saw a snapback to the older picture with the EPP mostly voting with the centre-left, whereas its overlap with the ECR and the other far-right parties fell off a cliff.

In contrast, not only the Greens jumped back up, the EPP even had a higher overlap with the Left than with the far right. For current EU politics, an unusual picture:

Source: Own calculation based on voting data from HowTheyVote.eu.

Public votes in the Council of the EU

For monitoring the Council votes, the analysis builds upon the public votes published, which are always fewer. For January 2026, they reached a new low, with only three public votes recorded by the Council, the lowest monthly figure since EU Analytics started, outside of the August break. Still, a few interesting bits:

• The most interesting Council vote was actually one that was not a regular public legislative vote, but the one giving the Commission the green light to sign the Mercosur trade agreement. After a final concession to farmers, Italy switched sides and supported the agreement. However, France, Poland and others voted against, so that the agreement passed by the slimmest of possible margins. A rare case where the specifics of QMV actually mattered, and rarer still that France is outvoted in the Council.
• From the other three public votes, the vote on the regulation for phasing out Russian fossil fuels stood out, with two No votes – from Hungary and Slovakia – plus one abstention from Bulgaria.

Public vote on a regulation phasing out Russian natural gas imports and preparing the phase-out of Russian oil imports, improving monitoring of potential energy dependencies. Source: Council of the EU.

Nicolai von Ondarza is Head of the Research Division EU/Europe of the German Institute of International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik).

EU Analytics is a monthly column by Nicolai von Ondarza. It focuses on data-driven analysis of EU institutional affairs, looking at voting in the European Parliament and the public votes of the Council of the EU. The articles are cross-posted here from Nicolai’s own newsletter on Substack, where he occasionally also does other institutional analysis.

Pictures: EP plenary cartoon: Nicolai von Ondarza, with Google Gemini [all rights reserved]; portrait Nicolai von Ondarza: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik [all rights reserved].