With just days to go in the race for president of the European Parliament, the EU cognoscenti in Brussels are confronting an unsettling new reality: No one knows who is going to win.

In a remarkable turn for an institution where leadership posts were long divvied up in hidden, backroom deals, candidates are campaigning fiercely for the job and jockeying for alliances with minority political groups. And surrogates for the leading contenders — Antonio Tajani of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and Gianni Pittella of the left-leaning Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats (S&D) — are actually attacking each other.

Manfred Weber, the German MEP who leads the EPP group, accused Pittella and Guy Verhofstadt, the candidate of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), of trying to cut the so-called “cordon sanitaire” by which the bigger pro-EU parties have blocked Euroskeptics from getting any foothold in the Parliament’s leadership.

“Let me make it clear that anyone that wants to break that pact between pro-European forces, well, those groups are responsible for allowing Euroskeptics and radicals to influence decisions in this house,” Weber said. “We don’t want that to come to pass and we will fight with every breath of our body to prevent it happening.”

“As socialists and democrats, we want a new direction for Europe based on investments, tax justice and social inclusion” — Udo Bullman, German MEP

Udo Bullman, a German MEP in the S&D, denounced Tajani as the “president of austerity,” linking him to the fiscal policies that countries like Greece and Italy view as a chokehold.

“Tajani is a leading light in the neoliberal political family that has made austerity a political dogma across Europe,” Bullman said in a statement. “Politicians of the ‘ancien regime’ like him have defended and enforced the antisocial economic policy that has plunged Europe into the worst economic and social crisis of its history.”

“Europe is still bearing the brutal consequences of austerity policies,” Bullman added. “As socialists and democrats, we want a new direction for Europe based on investments, tax justice and social inclusion.”

Such rhetorical combat between the EPP and S&D, which have led the EU in partnership for more than a decade, would have been unthinkable just months ago. And some wizened veterans of the Parliament cautioned the new politicking was little more than a facade — because ultimately the Parliament cannot function without a working coalition of the major, pro-European political groups.

Underscoring that point, French MEP Sylvie Goulard of ALDE circulated a proposal on Wednesday afternoon stressing the need for a grand bargain and even suggesting the election, scheduled for next Tuesday in Strasbourg, be postponed to allow a deal to take shape. Goulard, who had put herself forward as a candidate for president before her group’s leader, Verhofstadt, decided to run himself, also called for transparency in the negotiations — which would be another remarkable turn.

“There is a large risk, especially when the vote takes place by secret ballot, that the president will be elected by a simple majority, with the support of the extremists,” Goulard wrote. Noting that Parliament will have to approve any Brexit agreement, Goulard added: “If we want to avoid putting the future of the EU in danger then a reasonable solution absolutely needs to be found.”

However the events ultimately play out, the robust campaigning, including a POLITICO-sponsored debate among the candidates on Wednesday evening, suggests a fundamental shift that was hardly what party leaders envisioned when they hatched a secret power-sharing agreement in 2014. It also partly reflects the changed nature of the Parliament, which has seen its stature rise largely on the force of the personality of outgoing President Martin Schulz of the S&D.

An MEP from Germany since 1994, Schulz rose to prominence in 2003 after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, then presiding over the European Council, responded to criticism from Schulz by saying he should be cast as a Nazi guard in a movie about concentration camps. Schulz, who won the presidency as part of a more traditional Brussels political deal in 2012, had been maneuvering as recently as two months ago to stay on for an unprecedented third term, in violation of the power-sharing agreement that would have transferred the presidency to the EPP at the start of this year.

His decision in late November to abandon Brussels for the Bundestag caught everyone, including his colleagues in the S&D, by surprise and threw the race wide open.

Pittella, the Italian leader of the S&D group, then followed Schulz’s move by abandoning both the power-sharing deal and the Grand Coalition that has run the European Parliament since 2014.

Despite the heated campaigning, the contest for the presidency is still a numbers game that can only be won by forging some sort of deal among the largest of the rival groups. And unlike in a national election, what sways votes is not necessarily a candidate’s political views but what he or she can offer colleagues.

Put another way: The coalition is dead; long live the coalition.

“The Grand Coalition is inescapable and has been since 1979,” said French MEP Alain Lamassaoure, referring to the year when direct elections of MEPs began.

“Breaking the Grand Coalition, it’s Italian theater,” said Lamassaoure, who ran unsuccessfully against Tajani in the EPP’s presidential primary. “If we want to get out of this practice, we will let Euroskeptic groups arbitrate the EU’s political choices. And we can’t allow that.”

The EPP, which is not only the largest group in Parliament with 217 MEPs, but also the party of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has perhaps the greatest stake in preserving a coalition.

The S&D is the second-largest group with 189 MEPs, followed by European Conservatives and Reformists (74 MEPs) and ALDE (68 MEPs).

In a news conference Tuesday, Weber, the leader of the EPP group, defended the Parliament’s previous leadership deals as a normal part of open democracy, while simultaneously making public for the very first time the written power-sharing agreement signed in 2014 — a document that even most MEPs had never seen.

“This type of partnership arrangement is normal in democracy,” he said at a news conference, adding, “so we shouldn’t see this as doing a deal behind closed doors.”

In his press conference, Weber slammed Pittella and Verhofstadt, the ALDE leader, for their efforts to cut deals with fringe groups in pursuit of votes, while simultaneously excoriating the two men for abandoning the deal with the EPP.

In one breath, Weber insisted the EPP’s door was always open and Tajani “wants to be the president of the Parliament as a whole.” In the next, he insisted there would be no discussions whatsoever with Euroskeptic MEPs — and the EPP would battle any effort to let down the “cordon sanitaire.”

“Over the last decades MEPs have shown in their daily work and on the basis of the vast amount of legislation they have adopted, that we do not need a Grand Coalition" — Jens Geier, head of the German S&D delegation

Contradictions aside, Weber had a very straightforward main point: the S&D signed an agreement with the EPP to split the five-year presidential term between the Parliament’s two largest groups. And the S&D — after holding the presidency for the first half of the term — has now refused to honor the deal. The S&D has argued the deal was invalidated when Tusk, rather than a left-leaning candidate, became Council president.

Winning the presidency requires an outright majority of however many of the 751 MEPs vote Tuesday. The balloting is secret and up to four rounds are possible. In the event of a tie, the older candidate wins.

In pursuit of the votes, Verhofstadt tried and failed, rather spectacularly, to forge an alliance with Italy’s Euroskeptic 5Star Movement. Tajani also briefly courted the 5Stars in December but nothing came of the talks. Meanwhile, Pittella and the S&D remained in ongoing negotiations with smaller groups including those representing greens, communists and potentially others.

Pittella met Wednesday, for instance, with the radical left European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL). In courting their support, one attendee said, Pittella promised to fight the German-led fiscal austerity policies that have dominated the EU’s response to the euro crisis.

Responding to Weber and the EPP, Jens Geier, the head of the German S&D delegation, insisted Tuesday a coalition was not necessary to maintain a pro-European course in Parliament.

“Over the last decades MEPs have shown in their daily work and on the basis of the vast amount of legislation they have adopted, that we do not need a Grand Coalition to ensure stability in this House,” Geier said in a statement.