Negotiators from the three political groups that are rallying behind Jean-Claude Juncker, the nominee for president of the European Commission, are finalising a written coalition agreement outlining their shared political objectives for the coming five years.

Juncker, the candidate of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), is scheduled for a confirmation vote in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday (15 July). He needs an absolute majority of 376 votes from among the 751 MEPs, irrespective of how many MEPs are present for the vote. The EPP and its centre-left counterpart, the group of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), are nervous about their thin majority in the Parliament following elections in May. Together, the EPP and the S&D have 411 votes.

So they have admitted the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) into their ‘grand coalition’, bolstering it with 68 liberal MEPs. ALDE has gained one MEP, Romanian Norica Nicolai, who switched from the EPP. She was part of a group of six MEPs from the National Liberal Party that switched allegiance from ALDE to the EPP. As a consequence, the EPP now has 220 MEPs. ALDE’s centrist profile makes the group a credible addition to the grand coalition, unlike the Parliament’s third-largest group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), with its 70 MEPs.

But ALDE is asking a price for backing Juncker next week. It has already obtained rewards for having backed the centre-left Martin Schulz when he was re-installed as president of the European Parliament last week. It was granted two committee chairmanships and two vice-presidencies when these were allocated over the past few days (see page 7). That is double what ALDE might claim on the strength of its size alone, and returns it to the status it had in the previous parliamentary term, when it was larger and the third biggest group. In the new Parliament there are fewer possibilities for alternative coalitions. it is no longer possible for the S&D and ALDE to form an alternative ad-hoc alliance on specific policy issues with the Greens and the far-left – at least not in votes that require an absolute majority, which is the case, for example, if on second reading the plenary wants to change the Council of Ministers’ draft legislation. Taken together, S&D, ALDE, the far-left GUE and the Greens can muster just 361 votes.

Juncker made the rounds of the Parliament’s groups this week, setting out his programme and seeking to address concerns – without fully satisfying ALDE. Sophie in ’t Veld, the group’s chief negotiator, said that his programme contained two “glaring omissions” – combating youth unemployment and securing fundamental rights and the rule of law in the EU. She also dismissed Juncker’s economic programme as “not very concrete”.

She was also “rather surprised” by Juncker’s pledge to offer the UK a “fair deal” in reforming the EU – a follow-up to his failed bid to get the backing of Prime Minister David Cameron. “For the time being, we’re still a Union of 28 member states, all with equal rights,” she said. The Dutch MEP reiterated ALDE’s claim to key posts in the Commission and other EU institutions. “We want to have a part in the implementation of this programme in the next five years,” she said. “We want to have people in the right positions in the EU.”

There have been tensions in the coalition, with EPP MEPs disputing an apparent deal to give the centre-left the post of president of the European Council as well as that of foreign-policy chief. MEPs from the S&D, meanwhile, have attacked ALDE as an unreliable partner because it includes social liberals as well as those who see liberalism primarily as economic. Claude Moraes, a centre-left MEP from the UK who is the new chairman of the Parliament’s civil-liberties committee, said that ALDE had always been prone to splits because liberal traditions had always been diverse.

“Now, because they’re smaller, they’re going to be more ineffective, and more split,” he said. “That makes things very unpredictable.” He expects attitudes to the trade deal with the US to be a key test for the coalition. “What makes the ALDE group different from the S&D and EPP is that you just never know what they think about big issues like immigration, trade, the single market,” Moraes said, “because philosophically they are generally all over the place.”

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