That’s music to the ears of far-right politicians around the bloc, who might think the EPP’s move to declare them enemy No. 1 plays right into their hands. French firebrand Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland leader Alice Weidel will relish the attention as they challenge for power, while Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán is hardly camera-shy.
THE LOSERS
Ursula von der Leyen’s Green Deal legacy
In speech after speech, EPP leaders and heads of government used the EU’s once-vaunted, now oft-derided Green Deal as their punching bag. While they continued to claim fighting climate change was important, they distanced themselves from anything that could lead to job losses.
“Where would our industry and jobs be today, if we had not stopped the ideological climate policy à la Frans Timmermans?” Weber said in his speech, in a direct rebuke of the EU’s former Green Deal commissioner. He celebrated the EPP’s success in delaying and watering down green legislation, which was once the hallmark of the von der Leyen Commission.
In response, Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho back in Brussels said von der Leyen “fully stands by the Green Deal,” insisting it remains “a flagship of hers.”
The EU’s centrist coalition
Few relationships are more toxic than the centrist majority composed of the EPP, Socialists and the liberals. Despite fierce disagreements, they’re stuck in their dysfunctional grand coalition.
Weber took aim at his centrist allies, blaming their “weak” programs for the far-right surge, arguing the Socialists had “given up” on the working class, and that liberals (and Greens) appeal only to the “nice city quarters of well-educated, privileged voters.”
Migrants
The tough rhetoric against migrants was unmissable.
The EPP passed a resolution during the congress stating that asylum-seekers shouldn’t be allowed into the EU if they’re coming from a safe third country, and that applications could be processed in third countries, in a tacit endorsement of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Albania model.
