European Parliament: Is the grand coalition really a thing of the past?

While the European Parliament’s two largest political groups, the European People’s Party and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, have been used to sharing its presidency, they decided to fight with each other in January 2017 during the mid-term election. The S&D, indeed, decided to break the coalition agreement they had signed with the EPP after the 2014 European elections. Media and commentators talked about the end of the grand coalition and predicted a new era of decision-making, more political and conflictual. This study aims at analysing the evolution of coalition formation since the end of the 2014 coalition agreement. It uses both quantitative data (roll-call votes in plenary between 2014 and December 2017) and qualitative data (interviews). The grand coalition has remained determining for adopting legislation and non-legislation but has been activated less often when it comes to non-legislative amendments. Moreover, we found that the end of the agreement mostly impacted policy areas that were already conflictual in the past. We assume that coalition formation in the European Parliament is affected by institutional, interinstitutional and conjectural constraints, regardless of the deal signed between the three centrist political groups. In other words, the coalition agreement has only been a reference framework that justified cooperation practises already existing before the 2014.