The power she actually held
Roberta Metsola has presided over the European Parliament since 18 January 2022 after eight years as a Maltese EPP member and fourteen months as First Vice-President. Julian's lawyer who campaigned for Malta’s accession. The president’s gavel is real. It is not a Commission right of initiative and it is not a Belgian search warrant. Ursula von der Leyen still proposes. Political groups still whip. Treating Metsola as author of Union law would be false. Treating her as a bystander on Qatargate, CSAM and Frontex would also be false.
That limit is the first fact. The second is that a chair still moves welfare. The live score has to read dated votes, a secretary-general appointment, and a Kyiv visit as they were, not as a brand of “the House of European democracy”.
What went wrong, and what is proven
Qatargate broke on 9 December 2022. She returned from Malta so Belgian police could search immune offices, suspended parliamentary work with Qatar on 12 December, and opened immunity procedures in January 2023. Those are completed cooperation acts. They are not a completed clean-up. Human Rights Watch recorded a Conference of Presidents clamp on urgency resolutions. Transparency bodies kept saying monitoring and sanctions did not follow the 14-point speech. A later interinstitutional ethics body arrived without investigative teeth.
On 12 September 2022 the Bureau appointed Alessandro Chiocchetti, her head of cabinet, as secretary-general from 1 January 2023. A personnel act is not a criminal finding. It still sits on institutional-corruption as distrust of how the House fills its top civil-service post. In September 2024 Politico showed that an ethics code she had championed exempted the president from declaring her husband’s Royal Caribbean lobbying role as other members must.
Before the presidency she was the EPP rapporteur on the 2019 Border and Coast Guard regulation that wrote a 10,000-strong standing corps into law, and a co-author of a 2016 migration report aimed at binding readmission. In October 2020 she tabled EPP amendments widely read as shielding Boyko Borisov’s government. As president she backed CSAM detection politics that privacy supervisors called a scanning mandate. On 13 October 2023 she travelled to Israel with von der Leyen after 7 October; humanitarian access in Gaza remained a split Union line. Maltese anti-abortion votes as an MEP are completed, not cancelled by a later sentence that “her position is the Parliament’s”. Farmer-revolt politics around the withdrawn pesticide proposal sit on the Green Deal reversal.
What improved, and how far
Election as president on her forty-third birthday, and re-election with 562 votes, are completed personnel acts. First vice-presidency already recorded a Maltese first. On 1 April 2022 she became the first EU-institution president to visit Kyiv. Temporary protection, candidate status, accession talks and the Ukraine Facility are collective; she put them through a House. DMA, DSA and the AI Act were signed in that House. Conditionality had her LIBE-era fingerprints as an EPP coordinator, even when EPP governments were the targets.
She refused Joseph Muscat’s handshake during the Daphne Caruana Galizia crisis — a completed communication act, not a Maltese prosecution. She was co-rapporteur on an anti-SLAPP report. A Chișinău rally speech in May 2023 is a completed enlargement-politics act. Lifting immunity after Qatargate is on the improving side of that same scandal.
Shared responsibility, and what the score does not say
Von der Leyen, Breton, Vestager, Charles Michel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Belgian prosecutors, and EPP group leaders are not extras. Treating Metsola as author of the DMA, or as a bystander on Chiocchetti and CSAM, would be the same error in opposite directions.
The score does not say she took a suitcase of cash. It does not say CSAM already scans every phone. It does not convert a Kyiv visit into a Ukrainian brigade. Confidence is high on EUR-Lex, the 12 December 2022 sitting, and the secretary-general appointment, and only medium where group arithmetic and member-state borders sit between the gavel and a welfare indicator.
