In Wednesday’s State of the Union debate, the President of the European People’s Party (EPP), Manfred Weber, made it clear that Brussels’s most influential political family has definitively crossed over to the globalist camp. His intervention left no doubt: “The idea of national sovereignty is a Potemkin village; it no longer exists.” With that phrase, Weber summed up his group’s new creed: more Europe, fewer nation-states.
Weber defended an “irreversible” European Union in foreign and defense policy, convinced that the bloc can survive on the international stage only with a centralized apparatus. For the EPP leader, the future does not lie in strengthening national competencies but in handing more power to the EU institutions.
What Weber said does not differ much from what Ursula von der Leyen set out in her speech. The Commission President cloaked her proposals, as always, in lofty words about “European independence” and promises of competitiveness, agriculture, or media resilience—even though those same initiatives end up in agreements and structures undermining the member states. Weber, by contrast, dispensed with the window dressing and went all-in on federalism, making precise what the Commission axis is really aiming for: a fully centralized Europe.
The Bavarian leader did not stop at praising centralization. He used his intervention to attack Europe’s patriots, accusing them of being “friends of Musk, of Washington, and even of Moscow” and of wanting to turn Europe into a “technological colony of Silicon Valley and the Kremlin.” His words show that the EPP no longer conceives itself as a center-right party but as the force destined to manage the federalist project that von der Leyen stealthily advances.
Weber even defended the controversial Mercosur agreement, which has sparked deep concern among European farmers, describing it as “responsible” to avoid leaving South America in China’s hands.
The alignment with von der Leyen is evident as both push for more global deals, further transfers of sovereignty, and a supranational model that dilutes national identities.
