Ursula von der Leyen became president of the European Commission five years ago with a razor-thin parliamentary majority of just nine votes.

Securing a second term may be even more fraught, hinging on uncomfortable choices and backroom deals that must navigate the EU’s rightward shift in elections on Sunday.

While her centre-right European People’s party parliamentary group won the election and secured 185 seats in the 720-strong assembly, von der Leyen’s other centrist allies have fared worse, while the hard right surged from a fifth to nearly a quarter of seats.

“She has options, which is better than only having the hard right to turn to,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali. “But that doesn’t mean it will be easy to choose which option works.”

For a second five-year term at the helm of the EU commission, Brussels’ most powerful job, von der Leyen needs both the backing of the EU’s 27 leaders and a majority of the newly elected parliament. The latter has long been more of a concern.

In addition to the EPP, the other two groups that backed her in 2019 — the centre-left Socialists and Democrats and the liberal Renew — are projected to command around 402 seats in total according to preliminary results on Monday morning.

Her projected majority gives her a narrower space for manoeuvre compared with 2019, when the three groups together should have secured a 68-vote majority. But because many lawmakers voted against her and the ballot is secret, she passed by just nine votes.

In a vote expected on July 18, analysts forecast that von der Leyen would lose as much as 15 per cent of that coalition, which would leave her short of the majority she needs.

That means she and her team would need to reach out to other parties, officials said, including the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists, led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and the Greens.

But the jeopardy is that by expanding her coalition, she risks losing votes from the other side of the political spectrum. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, has warned against a pact with Meloni — and so has French President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

Bas Eickhout, one of the Greens’ two lead candidates for the election, said he was in touch with von der Leyen but that no formal negotiations had started. “I always had difficulties in understanding exactly how a coalition with ECR would work,” he said. “I’ve always seen the only reliable, stable democratic coalition possible is with the Greens.”

A person briefed on the discussions said: “You would not be surprised to know how many conversations have taken place between the EPP and the Greens in recent weeks.”

Seeking Green support would put von der Leyen in a complicated position given her retreat from a swath of climate legislation in recent months to fend off protests from farmers and rightwing parties. Embracing Meloni would be likely to involve a tougher stance on migration that could alienate her liberal supporters.

Von der Leyen will spend the next two weeks in a series of meetings with EU national leaders, including during an EPP conclave on Monday, the G7 leaders’ summit in Italy starting on Thursday and the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland next weekend.

She will seek both their personal backing at an EU summit on June 27 and for their parties’ backing in parliament.

“She needs to get the 27 [leaders] both comfortable with her vision for the next five years, but just as importantly, convinced she’s got the numbers in parliament,” said an EU diplomat involved in the preparations for the summit. “It would be a disaster for them to endorse someone who gets rejected by the MEPs. So she can’t approach it as two separate processes. They run in tandem.”

Von der Leyen’s pitch will be threefold: that she is the only available candidate who can win support from leaders and negotiate a deal to win a majority in parliament; that she steered the EU through the twin crises of Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and that it would be folly to change leadership in the middle of a war in Europe and with the potential return of Donald Trump as US president.

“We won the European elections. We are by far the strongest party. We are the anchor of stability and voters acknowledged our leadership,” von der Leyen told the party faithful on Sunday night to cheers of “five more years”.

She said she was “confident” of winning a second term, and that on Monday she would begin negotiating with the S&D and Renew groups, “building on a constructive and proven relationship”. When asked about coalition partners, she said she was open to talks with “those who are pro-European, pro-Ukraine, pro-rule of law”.

Among the lawmakers who supported her in 2019 were MEPs from Poland’s ultraconservative Law and Justice party and Hungary’s far-right Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a staunch von der Leyen critic.

EPP officials on Sunday expressed confidence in her winning a second term.

“There is no alternative being discussed in the party. And there’s a plurality of EPP leaders around the summit table. So she has nothing to worry about there,” said a senior commission official close to von der Leyen. “And so the question to the parliament is: if you are going to shoot a hostage, do you have a plan for afterwards? Because if they don’t, they’re voting for chaos.”

So far, only party leaders of the EPP and S&D have openly said they would back von der Leyen.

“At the end of the day the members of parliament are basically kids with guns,” said a senior EU diplomat. “So, really, who knows?”

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An out-of-control rodeo bull lept out of an Oregon arena and charged through a crowd of spectators Saturday — violently tossing and stampeding a woman who was in its path.

Chaotic video shows the escaped animal charging at the woman — who was wearing a red shirt — as it tore through the 84th Sisters Rodeo.

The bull, named Party Bus, flipped the woman so that she landed squarely on its head before the frantic animal spun her a second time off its horns. She then fell to the ground under the bull’s feet as it broke through a table and fled into the parking lot, the footage shows.

But the rodeo bull’s desperate attempt at freedom was short-lived, and Party Bus was captured by rodeo pick-up men next to livestock holding pens, the Sisters Rodeo Association said.

Three people were injured “as a direct result of the bull, two of whom were transported to a local hospital,” the association said in a statement. They were all released the following day.

A deputy also sustained minor injuries while responding to the wild escape, but did not say whether it was caused by Party Bus, police told KTVZ.

The incident happened shortly before 10 p.m. during the last run of the night at 84th Sisters Rodeo, a popular event that draws many of the nation’s top cowboys and thousands of spectators.

A second video shows the unsuspecting crowd singing along to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as Party Bus ran loops around the arena trying to avoid a pair of men riding horseback.

That’s when the bull spontaneously soared over the 7-foot fence, sending crowds sprawling out of the way.

Party Bus was removed from the arena after the incident.

“We obviously can’t replicate that scenario,” Leslie Lange, who provides livestock — including Party Bus –for the rodeo, told KTVZ.

“But we’re going to take him home, buck him again, do some training with him and try to never put him in that situation again.”

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association said Saturday’s incident is a reminder that “while rodeo is a highly-entertaining sport, on very rare occasions, it can also pose some risk.”

“PRCA sends our thoughts and well wishes to those who were injured or otherwise impacted by this frightening and very rare incident,” the association said.

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President Emmanuel Macron stunned France on Sunday when he called snap parliamentary elections after his centrist alliance was trounced by Marine Le Pen’s far-right movement in a European parliamentary vote.

Exit polls showed the Rassemblement National (RN) secured 31.5 per cent of the vote compared with 14.5 per cent for the French president’s centrist alliance, a stinging blow to Macron. He appeared to have only narrowly avoided a humiliating third place behind the centre-left, which took 14 per cent of the vote.

“For me, who always considers that a united, strong, independent Europe is good for France, this is a situation which I cannot countenance,” he said. “I have decided to give you back the choice of our parliamentary future with a vote.”

The first round of the parliamentary elections will be held in just three weeks, on June 30, with a run-off on July 7.

The dissolution is an extraordinary gamble by the French leader who has already lost his parliamentary majority after winning a second term as president two years ago. His alliance could be crushed, which would force him to appoint a prime minister from another party, such as the centre-right Les Republicains or even the far-right RN, in an arrangement known as a “cohabitation”.

In such a scenario, Macron would be left with little power over domestic affairs with three years left as president.

Macron said he believed a vote was needed to calm the volatile debates in the French parliament and achieve clarity on the direction of the country. Elysée officials said he had been considering it for some time to address gridlock in parliament.

François Bayrou, a centrist politician whose party is in alliance with Macron, said the president was aiming to “end the impasse” in politics by asking voters a simple question of “whether France really recognises itself in the proposals of the far-right”.

Le Pen celebrated the victory and hailed Macron’s response to it. “This shows that when the people vote, the people win,” she said in a victory speech. “I can only salute the president’s decision to call early elections . . . We are ready to exercise power if the French give us their backing.”

RN has 88 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly, making it the biggest opposition party. Macron’s centrist alliance has 249, so has had to cut deals with other parties to further his agenda.

There have been three previous political cohabitations in France — where a president has to share power with a prime minister and government from an opposing party — since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

Alain Duhamel, a veteran political analyst, predicted: “A dissolution means a cohabitation.”

In addition to the RN’s big win in Sunday’s European elections, another far-right party, Reconquête, was estimated to have won 5.3 per cent of the vote.

The margin of victory could lend huge momentum to Le Pen’s ambition to succeed Macron as president in 2027. The decision to call snap elections was presented by people close to the president as a high-stakes attempt to thwart her advance.

“This is a severe defeat for Macron given that he has been president for seven years and he has long said his goal is to combat the far-right,” said Bruno Cautrès, an academic and pollster at Sciences Po in Paris. 

The loss came after Macron had argued that the future of the EU was at stake because of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, economic competition with the US and China, as well as the need to fight climate change — all topics on which he said the far-right could not be trusted.

Yet the message did not move French voters, who have historically used European elections as protest votes against the incumbent president.

“Given that Emmanuel Macron has sought to position himself as the intellectual leader of Europe, the fact that French voters don’t follow him is problematic for him,” added Cautrès. 

Voting estimates showed the RN’s list, led by the charismatic 28-year-old party chief Jordan Bardella, had won almost as many votes as the combined total of Macron’s alliance, led by a little-known MEP Valerie Hayer, and the traditional parties of the centre-right and centre-left.

“In according more than 30 per cent of their votes to us, the French have delivered their verdict and marked the determination of our country to change the direction of the EU,” said Bardella in a speech from his campaign headquarters. “This is only the beginning.”

The results show the rising popularity of the RN since 2019 when they won 23.3 per cent of the vote in the last European elections, coming in only slightly ahead of Macron’s list which took 22.4 per cent.

Additional reporting by Adrienne Klasa

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