When it comes to health policy, the parties’ positions are clear.
“Health, in general, is a member state competence,” Michael Strauss, spokesman for the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, whose members include Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, told Politico.
In an emailed response, Europe should only play a “complementary role”, adding that countries “must retain the power to design and manage their health-care systems and align them with national sovereignty, culture, society, fiscal policies and legal and regulatory frameworks”.
European Parliament Elections Polls
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For Elisabeth Kuiper, head of the Social Europe and Welfare Program at the European Policy Center think tank, the outlook for EU health policy over the next five years is somewhat bleak. “The tendency of centrist, far-right parties is to feel that health is not an issue the EU should be dealing with,” Kuiper said. Thus, under a more right-leaning parliament, “health and social issues in general are not going to become any more important,” she told Politico.
This will come as a chilling blow to those who have been hoping for greater EU involvement in health policy over the past five years and to see it get even bigger in the future, such as Irena Joveva, a MEP from the centrist Slovenia Renew party and vice-chair of the Parliamentary Health Committee (SANT).
“The projected composition of the European Parliament worries me,” Jobeva told Politico, with her biggest fear being the emergence of a new “supergroup” that would combine the far-right Identity Democracy group (ID) and the right-wing European Freedom Party (ECR) with “other like-minded parties that are currently hiding in other political groups.”
