On one hand we should all agree that chat control is bad, OTOH the populist approach to issues it's IMO much worse than the issue itself.

There is no chat control in EU yet and there will not probably be one as envisioned by the gloomiest commentators, regardless on how the voting will go.

1 - online child abuse it's real, yes, it can be used as a pretext to sponsor unpopular laws, but it exists and can't be dismissed only as a false claim or something politicians bring up for their evil plan of global dominance and massive surveillance (last sentence is the rhetorical equivalent of What about the children?)

2 - political groups laser focusing on how the World will end if the EU discuss about some issue that has privacy implications aren't in any way better than those laser focusing on childrens' safety.

3 - the elected representatives are elected by the people of EU through a pure proportional electoral system, they represent the Europeans in almost perfect proportion to the population. The issues they are focused on are the issues that people of EU care about, we might not like the opinions and/or the acts of the majority, but it's how democracy work.

4 - the parliament is not new, the new elected representatives are still forming the new political groups (starting from today) so, no, there's no evil puppet master behind the regular schedule of the parliament

5 - issues like this one have been discussed in Europe for 15 years at least, it's nothing new, but every time there is someone predicting the end of the World as we know it. Why? it's simple: it's their job, they've been elected by a tiny minority, have little or no space compared to the larger political groups, so they need to be very local about it and use the sharpest tool of them all: fear. It's political marketing 101, nothing to see here, please disperse naked gun's style. In this case threema makes, not surprisingly, a chat app.

6 - Moreover, in November 2023 the parliament sided with encryption, by not approving the proposal to break E2E encryption while in March this year (2024) The European Court of Human Rights ruled that weakening encryption can violate fundamentals human rights (link to the sentence: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854...}). Democracy also means trusting the system, even when it seems that everything is lost.

7 - the law hasn't passed yet and the voting will probably be delayed again, due to the aforementioned parliament still not actually in place at full steam.

8 - if being European taught me something is that approving a law is one thing, enforcing it is a complete different story. In many countries, like mine, Italy, law enforcement is a farce, especially when it's about regulatory infringements.

Last but not least, laws protecting children have already been abused here in Italy (and I'm sure everywhere else) long before internet was a thing or without using any form of chat control just for political gain.

A couple of examples (sorry, Italian only)

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diavoli_della_Bassa_modenese

https://www.ilpost.it/2023/06/08/caso-bibbiano/

the second one has been so controversial (and the accusations in such bad faith) that the equivalent Wikipedia page has been removed and locked by the admins https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeli_e_demoni_(inchiesta).