EU elections: The Trio that will enter the ring for the Liberals

As the EU liberals kick off their joint election campaign on Wednesday (20 March) by presenting their three Franco-German lead candidates, Euractiv looks at who they are and what they want for Europe.

While the EU liberals sent seven candidates from seven countries into the race in 2019, they are sending only three for June’s elections—one for each of the three factions that form their joint group within the European Parliament, Renew Europe.

The liberal platform will kick off its election campaign on Wednesday by adopting its joint party manifesto and formally presenting the three Spitzenkandidaten—or lead candidates.

The Franco-German signature is obvious among the liberals’ top picks. Two candidates, Valérie Hayer and Sandro Gozi, belong to the camp of French President Emmanuel Macron, while Marie-Agnes Strack Zimmermann from the German FDP is the top candidate for the largest of the three parties, ALDE.

The Renew Europe group was only founded in 2019 after Macron’s party’s political newcomers joined ranks with the established liberal European party of ALDE, which still holds almost two-thirds of all the seats within the liberal group.

While Hayer and Gozi have primarily risen to prominence in the European Parliament since 2019, the ALDE candidate is widely unknown in Brussels but has a large power base in her native Germany.

The liberal “Jeanne d’Arc”

Strack-Zimmermann was widely seen as a surprise choice to lead ALDE into the European elections. Her name was only floated after Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and Luxembourg’s former prime minister and current Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel declined the job.

While not a big name outside of Germany, she is one of the biggest political heavyweights the German liberals currently have to offer.

According to the most recent polls from Monday, she is the fifth most popular politician in Germany and is second within the ruling coalition after Defence Minister Boris Pistorius.

While Strack-Zimmerann has never obtained the rank of a minister herself, she rose to fame as the head of the Defence Committee in the Bundestag, where she frequently attacked Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his cautious approach to support Ukraine.

Only last month, she broke ranks with her coalition and voted with the opposition on delivering Taurus missiles to Ukraine to increase the pressure on Scholz.

While she is part of the ruling coalition in the Bundestag, she became one of the fiercest opponents of Scholz, with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel even calling her the “Jeanne d’Arc of politics”.

The 66-year-old liberal has since tried to frame her age as something positive and is building her campaign around slogans such as “Grandma Courage” and the “statesman among women” in the current election campaign in Germany.

Strack-Zimmerann now wants to replicate her success in Germany through her nonchalant demeanour in Brussels, by being “streitbar in Europa” – which roughly translates as pugnacious or combative in Europe.

However, the FDP is currently polling at only 5% – less than half of what they got in the Bundestag election in 2021.

The Macronists

The other two candidates both belong to Macron’s ruling coalition in France.

Gozi is the secretary-general of the European Democratic Party (EDP), the smallest faction of the Renew Europe group, with only 10 MEPs – six of which come from France.

Previously an MP and under-secretary of European affairs in the Italian government under former prime minister Matteo Renzi, he was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 on France’s liberal joint list between Renaissance and Mouvement Démocrate, the latter being the leading force in the EDP.

EDP is one of the most pro-European factions, seeking to centralise further policy areas, as well as making the Commission a true European government, striving to make it possible to “elect a true President of the European Union,” their manifesto says.

The other candidate from Macron’s bloc is Valérie Hayer, previously co-president of the French Renaissance delegation, which she will now represent in the European election.

Until a few months back, no one outside the EU bubble had heard of Hayer, but within a couple of months, she was elected – unopposed – as new Renew chief in January after former boss Stéphane Séjourné was appointed foreign minister and named lead candidate for the Renaissance party in France.

Macron’s pick was less than evident, and Hayer’s nomination came at the very last minute after several political heavyweights turned down the lead candidate job.

But Hayer’s nomination came, in the end, amid a growing farmers’ crisis in France. Coming from a family of farmers with close ties to the farming community in the Western part of the country, she was seen to be the right pick to tackle the issue.

Unlike her German counterpart, Hayer, 37, is still a political heavyweight, and she will have to increase her stature ahead of the EU elections.

She faces an intense few months ahead – Renaissance has lost 5% in voting intentions from their 2019 score to 18.5%, with younger centrist and pro-EU voters more likely to turn to social democrat candidate Raphaël Gluckmann. The RN, meanwhile, is seeing its voting intentions go through the roof, having gone beyond the symbolic 30% line last week at 31%.

She told Euractiv in January, “I see those polls,” but “I don’t trust them […]. I’m confident that we will have a pro-European majority” come June 2024.

*Additional reporting by Max Griera.

[Edited by Alice Taylor]