(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El trauma de Estrasburgo)

The European Parliament resolution on Venezuela approved in Strasbourg last week has had collateral effects of great impact. Of shock. Certain political groups are traumatized by what happened. But let no one believe it is because of the content of the resolution. It is because of the majority that made it possible. The majority that formed changes the outlook of many for the entire legislature. Because they now see that Ursula von der Leyen’s operation — to ignore the result of the elections and, in the PPE’s alliance, embrace the whole of the left that lost the elections of 9 June — has an enormous Achilles’ heel. True, it served her to shape a European Commission tailored to her own measure, hijacking the vote received by no fewer than 188 People’s Party MEPs with the intention of continuing the centralist, socialist and radically ecologist social-engineering project of the past five years.

But, as is now evident, she cannot deactivate a new reality that has emerged all at once in this Strasbourg plenary and is already shaping up as the great threat to those plans of von der Leyen to go on making left-wing policy with right-wing votes as if nothing had happened.

Many things have happened on 9 June and afterward, and it was seen in that vote on Venezuela. The composition of the majority that managed to impose the original text — once the attempts of the European People’s Party to water down the content of the first points and to seduce the Renew group to its left had been frustrated — represents a resounding message that terrifies both the left and many within the European People’s Party.

The resolution, which demands the recognition of Edmundo González Urrutia as the democratically elected and legitimate president of Venezuela on the grounds that his victory is considered proven, was approved by 309 votes in favor and 201 against thanks to all the forces of the right, from the European People’s Party, the Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), Patriots for Europe (PfE), to Sovereign Nations (ESN), which includes the German AfD. From the PP to the AfD. It will frighten some, but it is a fact. And, as the resolution demonstrates, a very positive one. The attempts of the Socialists, Greens and communists to protect the criminal dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and his electoral fraud were frustrated.

And the fact is that the European People’s Party, in the Venezuela resolution, blew up that so-called “cordon sanitaire” — rather an anti-democratic harassment — that has been self-imposed from Germany and France especially and that obliges the People’s Party always to ally with the left. Because while the Socialists can always ally themselves even with the most criminal extremists, the People’s Party cannot ally itself with those who occupy the space that the People’s Party fertilized in its eternal drift toward social democracy.

The reality is that there exists a majority that is an alternative to the de facto “single social-democratic party” made up of the People’s Party, Socialists, Renew liberals and Greens, which has always governed in a fusion of the two-party system with add-ons. And the alternative is a strong majority of the right, from which the People’s Party will not be able to withdraw in the legislature that is beginning. Many of its members are going to try. But it will prove impossible for them, and quite a few others will be glad that it is so. In fact, as soon as the legislature began, it became clear.

When the People’s Party feels committed to certain principles for some reason of opportunity or necessity, they will find themselves forced to be in that majority which breaks the cordon sanitaire and creates the real majority that the European elections have generated. In the case of Venezuela it was the necessity for the Spanish PP to maintain a firm policy in the face of the obvious complicity of socialism, shepherded by the PSOE, with Maduro’s dictatorship. Because it could not leave Vox as the solitary defender of the cause of María Corina Machado, which this party had been until little more than a year ago. The PP had always preferred other, more “flexible,” negotiating and less “Trumpist” opposition figures.

In spite of everything, the PP tried to lower the tone when it got vertigo on seeing that the so-called Renew liberals, who are in reality social democrats and radical wokeists, were staying with the Socialists, communists and Greens. That morning they came to think within the PP that the resolution would not be approved. And it was the Patriots group, whose relations with the ECR are excellent, that also managed to mobilize ESN, a group that on principle tends to ignore these resolutions on political questions foreign to the EU. The PP’s attempts — with its legs trembling — to water down the resolution on Venezuela were knocked down, that majority was won by blowing up the cordon sanitaire, and it was shown to Europeans and to the world that there is now a conservative and national majority in the European Parliament. And thus was managed the first appearance of a reality that, much sooner than some believe, is going to pull the EU out of its suicidal drift, restore common sense, sobriety, rationality, competence and freedom to political discourse, and change the future of Europe. For the better.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.