Manfred Weber, the leader of the EPP Group, while under fire for drawing a second income, may really be catching flak for breaking taboos, such as outreach to nationalists, as internal factions struggle over the group’s future direction. Reproach comes especially from his German colleagues.
The changing political landscape across Europe may also mean this is sign of things to come, as the centre-right group sees more struggles between its Centre and its Right.
A small publicity stunt by Tobias Teuscher last week produced the latest controversy for Weber, when the spokesman and secretary of the nationalist ID Group held up a poster of Weber saying “we wouldn’t have been able to do this on our own. We had an excellent spin doctor.” This followed Weber’s comments that Europe is “sleepwalking into a new migration crisis,” and his role in pushing for a stronger line on EU migration policy.
Signals from domestic German politics suggest that CDU-CSU are not amenable to Weber’s rightward push. Friedrich Merz, Angela Merkel’s successor as leader of the Christian Democratic Union—Germany’s main centre-right party—has recently been vocal in his denouncement and expulsion of prominent party member Hans-Georg Maassen for the latter’s comments about the German media’s “burning desire for Germany to kick the bucket.” Merz was explicit that the move emphasised a continued ‘firewall’ between his party and the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Meanwhile, Markus Söder, president of Bavaria and leader of Christian Social Union—the CDU’s smaller Bavarian sister party of which Weber is a member—had some harsh words for his MEP. Söder said that Weber was making “a strategically serious mistake” for working with Berlusconi and courting Meloni, and was reported to have had a long talk with Weber earlier this month in Munich.
Weber has been the leader of the EU Parliament’s largest group since 2014, but his recent actions have been providing fuel for power plays within the German EPP delegation. With 29 MEPs, the German national delegation is over twice that of Spain, which is the next biggest caucus with 13 MEPs, and as such exercises a decisive influence within the Group.
While Weber received criticism for his extra income from CDU MEP Dennis Radtke, more significantly, it appears that the EPP leader has become distant from Ursula von der Leyen, who is a prime candidate for the group leadership, the Rheinische Post reports. She regularly attends meetings with CDU MEP David Caspary, while it appears that Weber is rarely invited.
Ultimately, bigger differences in national-level politics across Europe’s centre-right may end up swallowing German political manoeuvrings. On one side, there are EPP members such as Poland’s Civic Platform, which has a deeply polarised feud with the conservative Law and Justice party that governs Poland. The Polish division was key in torpedoing talk of EPP-ECR rapprochement last month.
On the other side are centre-right parties who have made coalition deals with nationalist and conservative parties. In Italy, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia are junior coalition partners to Melonis Fratelli d’Italia. In Sweden, the governing Moderate Party relies on the support of the nationalist Sweden Democrats.
Important countries such as Spain, Finland, and Greece are to go to the polls before the EU elections in 2024. With nationalist parties polling high, many centre-right parties will be forced to make the choice between maintaining their cordon sanitaire or creating coalitions if they want to govern. As such, it appears that this tug-of-war in the EPP, between its Europhile and right-wing factions, is set to continue.
