Instead, they point to Poland, where veteran conservative leader Donald Tusk unseated the nationalist Law & Justice government with his own coalition with progressives. Or they point to socialist Pedro Sánchez’s left-wing coalition government in Spain, who they accuse of tearing up the rule of law with an amnesty to Catalan separatists.
“We believe that there is no majority other than a pro-European majority of pro-European parties that can provide stability to Europe. Socialists know this as well, they’re just trying to be a bit populistic and trying to harm us at the European level,” Siegfried Mureşan, a Romanian EPP member of the European Parliament, said on the phone from Bucharest.
“At this point the only adult in the room is the EPP,” said Bakolas.
Yanked by the ear to the right
Still, all evidence points to an EPP shift to the right since the pandemic receded.
Manfred Weber, the German conservative lawmaker who leads the EPP both in Parliament and as its president across Europe, has successfully yanked von der Leyen by the ear to the right, first demanding a moratorium on new Green Deal laws last year, and now leading the debate on the need for Europe to ramp up its defense capacities.
The gulf between the quietly conservative, technocratic Commission chief von der Leyen and the brazen parliamentarian Weber is one that opponents have started to expose for their own political gain. Iratxe García, the Socialist leader in Parliament, pointed out to reporters in Rome that the EPP tried to kill a nature bill the Commission president herself proposed. This is not coherent, García said.