The outcome the recent European Parliament Elections is bad news for Israel’s right-wing coalition, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, according to an analysis on American website of Lobelog entitled "What Do European Parliament Elections Mean For The Middle East?"
According the the writer of the op-ed Eldar Mamedov, with the Trump administration embracing unreservedly the Israeli-Saudi-Emirati agenda on issues like Israel-Palestine, Iran, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the EU was seen by these actors as an irritating outlier refusing to toe the line. The results of the elections suggest that the EU, embodied by the next high representative for foreign policy, will continue pursuing engagement with Iran. It will also keep opposing the effective burial of the two-state solution on Israel-Palestine, the isolation of Qatar, and terrorist designation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This means that the Saudi-UAE strategy of befriending Euroskeptic and far-right forces backfired. Indeed, the voting record in the outgoing parliament suggests that these forces were among their staunchest allies, opposing resolutions condemning human rights violations in both countries (plus Bahrain) and demands to introduce arms embargoesagainst both Saudi Arabia and UAE for their role in the war in Yemen. The common cause Riyadh and Abu Dhabi made with these groups was based on their shared dislike of the EU as a collective body based on liberal values; a strong preference for transactional, bilateral state-to-state relations; and a hostility both to human rights and, in particular, to any manifestations of political Islam. Yet, given their result in the EP elections, investment in these forces has proved to be a failure.
The positions of Saudi Arabia and UAE were further undermined by the abysmal performance of the British Conservative Party, traditionally their chief supporters in the European Parliament. The Tories went from 19 MEPs down to 4. Accordingly, their political group—European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)—was downgraded from being the third largest in the chamber with 75 MEPs to being fifth with 63. The influence of the conservative British MEPs ensured that the ECR was arguably the most pro-Gulf group in the EP, opposing (with few exceptions) resolutions condemning human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, and even holding a bureau meeting in Bahrain in 2018.
MNA/PR
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