The Parliament rejected the Commission's proposal by 439 votes to 181 , with 38 abstentions. The motion fell because EPP — the largest group — voted mostly against (only 136 of its members supported rejection of the Commission text, while 22 voted to keep it), but was joined in voting it down by S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA, The Left, and most of PfE, producing a lopsided majority against adoption. The consultation-procedure resolution carries no binding legal force, but it constitutes Parliament's formal political position and is intended to press the Council on how the recast directive should be shaped. The substantive cleavage across the ten amendment votes ran consistently along a left–right line. The centre-left coalition — S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA and The Left — backed amendments that would have retained or raised the Commission's proposed excise floors, added a non-decreasing ratchet on minimum rates, removed any upper cap on periodic adjustments, fixed the cigarette duty at €215 per 1 000 units and 63 % of the retail price, and embedded WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Article 5.3 obligations into the text. The right-of-centre bloc — EPP, ECR, and PfE — largely voted against those amendments and, in the one amendment they carried (Am 60–61), succeeded in lowering the cigarette excise floor from 63 %/€215 to 60 %/€200 per 1 000 cigarettes. The single amendment to pass with majority support other than the cigarette floor reduction was Am 91, which inserted a reference to WHO FCTC Article 5.3 and required caution with tobacco-industry data; it was carried by 297 votes to 267 , supported by S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA and The Left, with EPP, ECR and PfE mostly opposed. The centre-left's other amendments — on the non-decreasing floor, the cap removal, the strengthened recital language and the WHO nicotine-products stance — all fell, in some cases by narrow margins (Am 5110 by just 9 votes, Am 5108 by 27 votes). The overall picture is of a chamber divided on how far to go in using excise policy as a public-health instrument, with the right favouring lower or more flexible floors and the centre-left favouring higher, more rigid ones — a disagreement the final vote, which rejected the amended text as a whole, left unresolved.
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