Has Europe’s largest political party gone rogue?

The biggest group in the European Parliament, the centre-right European People’s Party, has recently adopted a more aggressive approach towards key legislative proposals, upsetting some of its lawmakers and putting the balance of the EU’s legislative machine at risk.

The EPP has been traditionally at the centre of European politics, replicating at the EU level the German Grand Coalition scheme whereby mainstream parties from centre-right and centre-left joined forces to keep extremist parties out of government.

However, after almost 25 years as a beacon of stability, the EPP leadership’s new strategy is set to turn the political group into a major uncertainty factor for EU policymaking.

The global strategy is to attack on several fronts, opposing pro-migration policies, overregulation, and the over-arching legislative effort, the EU’s Green Deal. The main driver of this strategy is Manfred Weber, the EPP’s president, who was denied the post of Commission president following the last European elections in 2019.

Weber belongs to the Christian Social Union from Bavaria (CSU), which, together with its sister party, the much larger Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is the most influential delegation inside the EPP group.

The German centre-right parties are undergoing an identity crisis following the retirement of Angela Merkel, the chancellor who dominated German politics from 2005 to 2021.

As the next European Parliament elections in June 2024 are fast approaching, Weber has taken a much more belligerent approach on EU legislative files to secure electoral gains and shape the agenda of the next mandate. The results are visible across the board.

From the Corporate Due Diligence Directive to the Nature Restoration Law and the AI Act, centre-right lawmakers are actively sabotaging texts they supported at the committee level to win support from business leaders, farmers, and law enforcement supporters.

Leadership’s power grab

Remarkably, the first victims of Weber’s confrontational strategy are the EPP’s own MEPs, shadows and opinion rapporteurs who invested months of their time and political capital into shaping various files in the interest of their group, only to be thrown under the bus in plenary vote.

In several cases, the group’s parliamentary committee coordinators, who have a leading role in the EPP’s internal structure, not only overruled the shadows when deciding on voting lines but also completely side-lined them when preparing the voting lists that define which parts of the text are voted on separately and how.

An EPP source told EURACTIV that many are concerned that future cooperation with other political groups might be permanently jeopardised for small electoral returns.

Discontent inside the EPP is growing and is set to build up further as the end of the mandate approaches. Still, MEPs have so far toed the party line for fear of being left off new electoral lists.

Weber is both president of the group and the party. As soon as he took office, Weber initiated a range of deep changes within the political family, transforming it into a permanent electoral campaign and drawing it away from the centre to the right.

Changes in voting patterns followed suit, with the EPP increasingly aligning with right-wing lawmakers, altering the political equilibrium inside the European Parliament. EU policies are no longer the priority.

Communication over content

When the EPP met in Munich in early May, a highly critical resolution of the crucial green files of Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission was imposed top-down on delegates, a second source from the EPP told EURACTIV.

According to a third EPP official, Weber’s strategy is to differentiate himself from von der Leyen, who came from the CDU’s ranks, and regain the traditional conservative electoral base, such as farmers, effectively transforming the EPP.

However, repositioning Europe’s largest political group into an opposition party is already taking its toll on EU policymaking, with the other parties not hiding their disappointment as they are struggling to finalise key laws before the end of the mandate.

“They are in full election mode in a way that is, to some extent, not serious because they seem to ignore facts and concentrate on propaganda,” said Brando Benifei, the head of the Italian delegation of Socialists and Democrats group, the second largest in the Parliament.

Benifei, co-rapporteur for the AI Act, referred to the fact that the EPP had tabled group amendments on Remote Biometric Identification despite commitments not to do so. But even more significant for EU policy might be the group’s increasingly vehement opposition to the Green Deal.

A recent attempt to sink the Nature Restoration Law is symptomatic of the EPP’s growing uneasiness about the Commission’s green agenda. The law, which survived a committee vote by the skin of its teeth last week to go into further parliamentary scrutiny, has been the focal point of the growing tensions.

Liberal MEP Pascal Canfin of the centrist Renew group, who is also chair of the influential environmental committee, told journalists on 13 June that he had heard from “direct and various sources” that Weber had warned potential defector MEPs that if they “want to have their place on the list next time, make sure you don’t show up”.

If the file falls in July’s plenary, it will be the first failure of the Green Deal, with possible knock-on effects to follow.

For his part, Weber dismissed the accusations as a sign of growing nervousness on behalf of Renew. Weber’s office did not reply to EURACTIV’s request for a more detailed comment by the time of publication.

The real target

While the centre-right lawmakers have openly taken aim at Frans Timmermans, the EU green policy chief, the real target is the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who took what Weber saw as his post in 2019.

According to a fourth EPP source, the group’s sudden shift on EU policies was part of Weber’s “personal political agenda” to torpedo von der Leyen’s re-election while building bridges with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), who are expected to gain significant extra seats in the next election.

A first testbed for moving the gravity centre of European politics further to the right might be the Spanish elections in July, where the Partido Popular (EPP), aims to form a governing coalition with ECR’s Vox. Weber has been actively campaigning, attacking the Commission and the incumbent Spanish socialist-led government.

However, exporting a right-to-centre majority at the EU level might be easier said than done, as it is far from certain that French President Emmanuel Macron, who dominates the centrist Renew group, would ever support this operation. Meanwhile, Germany currently has an S&D chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

“Weber’s strategy is not to become Commission chief now but after the 2029 elections. He stands ready to sacrifice the Commission’s presidency this time to the socialists and then launch fierce opposition,” the fourth source added.

Meanwhile, keeping the EPP together will prove increasingly challenging, as the more liberal delegations did not buy into Weber’s conservative turn and might be tempted to leave the group to join Renew, according to parliamentary rumours.

Still, insiders believe that for Weber, the success of this operation might simply be a matter of political survival, whatever the cost.

*Sarantis Michalopoulos, Natasha Foote, Eleonora Vasques, and Max Griera contributed to the reporting.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Benjamin Fox]