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The weekend was marked by several elections. In Lithuania and Bulgaria, citizens cast their votes in parliamentary elections – in Bulgaria for the seventh time in three and a half years. However, Europe looked to Georgia in particular – with concern: reports of attempts to manipulate elections are fueling fears that the country’s government is moving further away from a democratic path. Lisa-Martina Klein reports from Tbilisi.
Since Manfred Weber took over the leadership of the European People’s Party in 2022, the party has been rather quiet. The group of almost 200 MEPs has recently carried considerably more weight. Now a reform is set to bring new momentum. One of the goals: The EPP commissioners and ministers from the member states are to improve their networking. Read Markus Grabitz‘s feature to find out Weber’s plans.
Whenever there is a debate about the German debt brake, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner likes to point to the strict EU fiscal rules. But the matter is not that simple, writes Marina Guldimann from the NGO Fiscal Future in her opinion: Germany’s problem is not so much a government spending spree as an anti-growth austerity policy. This significantly limits the opportunities for future generations.
Have a problem-free start to the week!
Two days after the parliamentary elections in Georgia, it is completely unclear whether a government will be formed or new elections held. According to the controversial results of the Central Election Committee, the ruling Georgian Dream party has a clear majority of 54 percent. The party of Russia-friendly oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili did not achieve its goal of a constitution-amending majority in parliament. Nevertheless, it is the best result for the party since 2012.
The election result was surprisingly poor for the opposition despite a record voter turnout of just under 60 percent. According to official figures, the four largest groups achieved 37.6 percent in total. However, politicians from the strongest opposition alliance, the United National Movement (UNM) and some politicians from the liberal Coalition of Unity, do not want to take up their seats due to suspicions of electoral fraud. Sergo Chikhladze from the liberal Coalition of Unity told Table.Briefings: “The elections were not free and fair. We will not recognize the result.”
Georgia’s EU-friendly President Salome Zurabishvili also spoke of a “total fraud” and “vote theft” on Sunday evening. “We were witnesses and victims of a Russian special operation,” she said and called on citizens to protest on Monday evening. In the run-up to the elections, it was expected that a situation of instability would arise.
On election day, there were numerous attempts at manipulation by supporters of the Georgian Dream party. Election observers reported intimidation and violent attacks on voters, journalists and politicians. Voters attempted to vote in several polling stations or to cast several ballots in one ballot box. One polling station therefore had to be closed early and all votes declared invalid.
In its report on Sunday, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) expressed concerns about the credibility of the results and called for an investigation into the election irregularities. Election observers from the European Parliament also expressed concern about the events: “We fear that the climate of hatred and intimidation we witnessed on the election day could seriously undermine the political process in Georgia,” said Antonio López-Istúriz White, head of the European Parliament’s election observation delegation, in Tbilisi on Sunday.
Resistance was already mobilized in civil society on Sunday night. A spokeswoman for the local observer mission My Vote said that the election had been manipulated on a large scale. She announced that she would call for the official results to be annulled.
Nino Dolidze, head of the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), Georgia’s most important election observation group, was more reserved. She said at a press conference on Sunday: “We are questioning the process of how the election results came about.” There had been serious violations and manipulation attempts before and during the election. The investigations are still ongoing and could ultimately influence the election result.
Council President Charles Michel announced that Georgia would be on the agenda of the informal Council meeting in Budapest and called for a swift, transparent investigation into electoral irregularities by the competent authorities. “We reiterate the EU’s call to the Georgian leadership to demonstrate its firm commitment to the country’s EU path,” Michel wrote on X.
Foreign policy experts from several countries called on the EU not to recognize the elections. “We are very concerned about the ‘Belarusification’ of the country,” the politicians, including Michael Roth, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag, wrote in a joint statement obtained by the Reuters news agency. If the ruling party follows up its announcement with action, there is a risk that the opposition, independent media and critical non-governmental organizations will be persecuted and banned.
“The EU must make it clear to the ruling party that it will not accept this and that in this case a complete break in relations will follow,” reads the statement, which was signed by the chairmen of the foreign affairs committees of the parliaments of Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Canada as well as leading foreign policy experts from Poland, Italy and Sweden.
The parliamentary elections were seen as the fateful election for Georgia’s decision between Russia and Europe. It followed ongoing anti-democratic measures by the ruling party. In May, it passed the so-called foreign agent law based on the Russian model, and recently a law was added that restricts the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community. As a result, the EU effectively put accession negotiations on hold in June. With dpa/rtr/sas
The text was written during a research trip to Georgia. The trip was organized and financed by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The author was accredited as an international election observer for election day.
The Christian Democratic party family of the European People’s Party (EPP) is to receive an update. Manfred Weber, who is also party leader in addition to his position as group leader in the European Parliament, wants to make the party more modern, more powerful and more capable of campaigning. The parliamentary group, with almost 200 MEPs and numerous staff in the MEPs’ offices, has recently carried considerably more weight, while the party’s substantive work has withered away.
Weber had fired two full-time deputy general secretaries and not refilled the posts. The German Christian Kremer was one of the two Deputy General Secretaries, responsible for the development of the program. Friedrich Merz brought Kremer into the Konrad Adenauer House in September 2023 as Head of the External Affairs Department. Apart from the elected Secretary General Thanasis Bakolas, a few press officers and secretaries, hardly anyone else worked at the EPP headquarters in Rue de Commerce in Brussels.
Weber will stand for re-election as party leader at the party conference in Valencia, Spain, in April 2025 and plans to have the concept for the party reform ready by then. He has tasked Siegfried Mureșan, one of his ten deputies, and treasurer Francois-Xavier Bellamy with drawing up the reform. Mureșan, Weber’s deputy also in the parliamentary group, told Table.Media: “We want to draw up the reform in a transparent and inclusive process that involves all member parties.”
The reform is to be designed by a steering group comprising around 10 to 15 high-ranking officials and EPP personalities. Below the steering group, there will be a task force to which each member party can delegate one person. The EPP currently has 82 parties and partners from 43 countries. These include parties from non-EU countries such as Albania, Belarus and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The networking of EPP Commissioners and Ministers from the Member States is to be improved. To this end, the EPP wants to revive the format of meetings in the run-up to Councils of Ministers – similar to the “summits” before European Councils, at which the EPP heads of state and government meet before the EU summit. During the sovereign debt crisis, for example, the EPP ministers from the member states coordinated intensively before important Councils. Meetings of this kind had also become dormant because there were hardly any EPP-led governments in the meantime. This has now changed. Ministers and Commissioners with an EPP background now dominate both the Councils of Ministers and the Commission.
The EPP party body of the Political Assembly is to be retained. It meets four times a year and around 200 delegates from the member parties take part. The CDU, for example, sends twelve elected delegates. Since Weber became head of the EPP, the Political Assembly has met once in Munich and once in Lisbon. The practice of not meeting in Brussels once a year is also to be maintained.
There are plans to set up another party body between the Political Assembly and the 14-member party presidium. This body would coordinate EPP activities in Parliament, the Council and the Commission. The party presidium would consist of the party leader, his ten deputies, the treasurer, the secretary general and the Commission president. A policy department is also to be set up at party headquarters.
There will also be changes to the team responsible for the election campaigns for the lead candidates. So far, the EPP headquarters has prepared three election campaigns for top candidates:
Each time, the lead candidate brought his people with him to prepare and run the election campaign. After each European election, the team left the EPP headquarters – and took their expertise with them. In future, the aim is to keep the experience from the election campaigns at headquarters.
In the course of the party reform, it should also be clarified which tasks the central office should perform for the member parties, what support the member parties expect from the central office and what the member parties can provide to the central office. Only when these questions have been clarified will the organizational chart of the head office be drawn up.
It is already clear today that General Secretary Thanasis Bakolas will no longer play a role: His contract ends with the party congress in April. In the past, the EPP always had a Secretary General who was also an MEP. Weber had also changed this structure. It is not yet clear whether a full-time Secretary General will remain. There is speculation that former MEP Tom Vandenkendelaere will become the new Secretary General. Weber had recently made him “Chief of staff” at the party headquarters. This had led to a disagreement between Weber and his Secretary General Bakolas.
Last April, the EU member states agreed on a reform of the EU fiscal rules, which is now taking effect. Finance Minister Christian Lindner in particular had insisted on strict numerical limits – which must now also be applied in Germany. Lindner’s argument: not only the German debt brake, but also the EU fiscal rules would force him to make savings.
However, relying on austerity policy in the current, economically uncertain situation, is not an economic necessity, but a political decision. As representatives of Fiscal Future, an NGO of young people for a sustainable fiscal policy, we therefore have a more differentiated view: The new EU fiscal rules are not a “deliberate own goal” for Lindner’s austerity policy, but a genuine own goal for Germany’s economic future.
Specifically, this concerns the Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA), based on which the EU Commission agrees a net spending path with the member states that exceed the benchmarks. Germany was also supposed to submit a spending plan by October 15. This deadline was not met by the Ministry of Finance. Consideration is now being given to extending the adjustment period from four to seven years – an opt-out option under the new regulations.
Schadenfreude is also coming from Brussels – Germany of all countries , the EU’s model saver, does not have its public finances under control. And Lindner is using the situation as backing in the dispute over the debt brake by pointing out that the new EU fiscal rules are even stricter than the national ones.
But it is not that simple. The fact that Germany is at risk of not adhering to the net expenditure path is not due to government spending addiction, but to anti-growth austerity policies. For the DSA, it is not only the debt level that counts, but above all the growth forecasts. More and more economists are attributing the fact that these are currently so pessimistic to the lack of investment and the restrictive budget policy. For this reason, the IMF has also just adjusted its economic forecast for Germany for 2025 downwards by 0.5 percentage points and has been recommending a relaxation of the debt brake for some time.
Lindner’s logic of “Germany is the sick man of Europe, so we have to make savings” therefore does not apply – and is also not found in the DSA. This is because the condition for extending the adjustment period is that the country must present plans for structural reforms and investments that promote growth and resilience. What is required is precisely the investment policy that Germany needs now – and which the debt brake is blocking.
Nils Redeker from the Jacques Delors Centre therefore recommends that a new government should renegotiate the spending plans after the federal elections and use them as the basis for an ambitious investment policy. Extending the adjustment period from four to seven years is therefore not “detention” because Germany has not “done its homework.” It is an opportunity for a more far-sighted, investment-promoting and therefore also more intergenerationally fair financial policy.
Despite the little additional leeway that the new EU fiscal rules leave, they still fall far short of their original goal: to create a sustainable European financial framework. According to calculations by the New Economic Forum, only three member states will be able to invest sufficiently in the socio-ecological transformation under the new rules.
At the same time, the DSA has also been criticized for lacking transparency and underestimating the negative growth effects of fiscal consolidation. As the Draghi Report has already suggested, the EU will need a credit-financed joint investment program in the long term – a fund for the future – in order to meet the challenges of transformation and new geo-economic realities.
It is clear to us that rigid debt limits jeopardize the room for manoeuvre of future generations – at the national and European level. They must not be used as a political argument to block the necessary investments in the future.
The weekend was marked by several elections. In Lithuania and Bulgaria, citizens cast their votes in parliamentary elections – in Bulgaria for the seventh time in three and a half years. However, Europe looked to Georgia in particular – with concern: reports of attempts to manipulate elections are fueling fears that the country’s government is moving further away from a democratic path. Lisa-Martina Klein reports from Tbilisi.
Since Manfred Weber took over the leadership of the European People’s Party in 2022, the party has been rather quiet. The group of almost 200 MEPs has recently carried considerably more weight. Now a reform is set to bring new momentum. One of the goals: The EPP commissioners and ministers from the member states are to improve their networking. Read Markus Grabitz‘s feature to find out Weber’s plans.
Whenever there is a debate about the German debt brake, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner likes to point to the strict EU fiscal rules. But the matter is not that simple, writes Marina Guldimann from the NGO Fiscal Future in her opinion: Germany’s problem is not so much a government spending spree as an anti-growth austerity policy. This significantly limits the opportunities for future generations.
Have a problem-free start to the week!
Two days after the parliamentary elections in Georgia, it is completely unclear whether a government will be formed or new elections held. According to the controversial results of the Central Election Committee, the ruling Georgian Dream party has a clear majority of 54 percent. The party of Russia-friendly oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili did not achieve its goal of a constitution-amending majority in parliament. Nevertheless, it is the best result for the party since 2012.
The election result was surprisingly poor for the opposition despite a record voter turnout of just under 60 percent. According to official figures, the four largest groups achieved 37.6 percent in total. However, politicians from the strongest opposition alliance, the United National Movement (UNM) and some politicians from the liberal Coalition of Unity, do not want to take up their seats due to suspicions of electoral fraud. Sergo Chikhladze from the liberal Coalition of Unity told Table.Briefings: “The elections were not free and fair. We will not recognize the result.”
Georgia’s EU-friendly President Salome Zurabishvili also spoke of a “total fraud” and “vote theft” on Sunday evening. “We were witnesses and victims of a Russian special operation,” she said and called on citizens to protest on Monday evening. In the run-up to the elections, it was expected that a situation of instability would arise.
On election day, there were numerous attempts at manipulation by supporters of the Georgian Dream party. Election observers reported intimidation and violent attacks on voters, journalists and politicians. Voters attempted to vote in several polling stations or to cast several ballots in one ballot box. One polling station therefore had to be closed early and all votes declared invalid.
In its report on Sunday, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) expressed concerns about the credibility of the results and called for an investigation into the election irregularities. Election observers from the European Parliament also expressed concern about the events: “We fear that the climate of hatred and intimidation we witnessed on the election day could seriously undermine the political process in Georgia,” said Antonio López-Istúriz White, head of the European Parliament’s election observation delegation, in Tbilisi on Sunday.
Resistance was already mobilized in civil society on Sunday night. A spokeswoman for the local observer mission My Vote said that the election had been manipulated on a large scale. She announced that she would call for the official results to be annulled.
Nino Dolidze, head of the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), Georgia’s most important election observation group, was more reserved. She said at a press conference on Sunday: “We are questioning the process of how the election results came about.” There had been serious violations and manipulation attempts before and during the election. The investigations are still ongoing and could ultimately influence the election result.
Council President Charles Michel announced that Georgia would be on the agenda of the informal Council meeting in Budapest and called for a swift, transparent investigation into electoral irregularities by the competent authorities. “We reiterate the EU’s call to the Georgian leadership to demonstrate its firm commitment to the country’s EU path,” Michel wrote on X.
Foreign policy experts from several countries called on the EU not to recognize the elections. “We are very concerned about the ‘Belarusification’ of the country,” the politicians, including Michael Roth, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag, wrote in a joint statement obtained by the Reuters news agency. If the ruling party follows up its announcement with action, there is a risk that the opposition, independent media and critical non-governmental organizations will be persecuted and banned.
“The EU must make it clear to the ruling party that it will not accept this and that in this case a complete break in relations will follow,” reads the statement, which was signed by the chairmen of the foreign affairs committees of the parliaments of Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Canada as well as leading foreign policy experts from Poland, Italy and Sweden.
The parliamentary elections were seen as the fateful election for Georgia’s decision between Russia and Europe. It followed ongoing anti-democratic measures by the ruling party. In May, it passed the so-called foreign agent law based on the Russian model, and recently a law was added that restricts the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community. As a result, the EU effectively put accession negotiations on hold in June. With dpa/rtr/sas
The text was written during a research trip to Georgia. The trip was organized and financed by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The author was accredited as an international election observer for election day.
The Christian Democratic party family of the European People’s Party (EPP) is to receive an update. Manfred Weber, who is also party leader in addition to his position as group leader in the European Parliament, wants to make the party more modern, more powerful and more capable of campaigning. The parliamentary group, with almost 200 MEPs and numerous staff in the MEPs’ offices, has recently carried considerably more weight, while the party’s substantive work has withered away.
Weber had fired two full-time deputy general secretaries and not refilled the posts. The German Christian Kremer was one of the two Deputy General Secretaries, responsible for the development of the program. Friedrich Merz brought Kremer into the Konrad Adenauer House in September 2023 as Head of the External Affairs Department. Apart from the elected Secretary General Thanasis Bakolas, a few press officers and secretaries, hardly anyone else worked at the EPP headquarters in Rue de Commerce in Brussels.
Weber will stand for re-election as party leader at the party conference in Valencia, Spain, in April 2025 and plans to have the concept for the party reform ready by then. He has tasked Siegfried Mureșan, one of his ten deputies, and treasurer Francois-Xavier Bellamy with drawing up the reform. Mureșan, Weber’s deputy also in the parliamentary group, told Table.Media: “We want to draw up the reform in a transparent and inclusive process that involves all member parties.”
The reform is to be designed by a steering group comprising around 10 to 15 high-ranking officials and EPP personalities. Below the steering group, there will be a task force to which each member party can delegate one person. The EPP currently has 82 parties and partners from 43 countries. These include parties from non-EU countries such as Albania, Belarus and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The networking of EPP Commissioners and Ministers from the Member States is to be improved. To this end, the EPP wants to revive the format of meetings in the run-up to Councils of Ministers – similar to the “summits” before European Councils, at which the EPP heads of state and government meet before the EU summit. During the sovereign debt crisis, for example, the EPP ministers from the member states coordinated intensively before important Councils. Meetings of this kind had also become dormant because there were hardly any EPP-led governments in the meantime. This has now changed. Ministers and Commissioners with an EPP background now dominate both the Councils of Ministers and the Commission.
The EPP party body of the Political Assembly is to be retained. It meets four times a year and around 200 delegates from the member parties take part. The CDU, for example, sends twelve elected delegates. Since Weber became head of the EPP, the Political Assembly has met once in Munich and once in Lisbon. The practice of not meeting in Brussels once a year is also to be maintained.
There are plans to set up another party body between the Political Assembly and the 14-member party presidium. This body would coordinate EPP activities in Parliament, the Council and the Commission. The party presidium would consist of the party leader, his ten deputies, the treasurer, the secretary general and the Commission president. A policy department is also to be set up at party headquarters.
There will also be changes to the team responsible for the election campaigns for the lead candidates. So far, the EPP headquarters has prepared three election campaigns for top candidates:
Each time, the lead candidate brought his people with him to prepare and run the election campaign. After each European election, the team left the EPP headquarters – and took their expertise with them. In future, the aim is to keep the experience from the election campaigns at headquarters.
In the course of the party reform, it should also be clarified which tasks the central office should perform for the member parties, what support the member parties expect from the central office and what the member parties can provide to the central office. Only when these questions have been clarified will the organizational chart of the head office be drawn up.
It is already clear today that General Secretary Thanasis Bakolas will no longer play a role: His contract ends with the party congress in April. In the past, the EPP always had a Secretary General who was also an MEP. Weber had also changed this structure. It is not yet clear whether a full-time Secretary General will remain. There is speculation that former MEP Tom Vandenkendelaere will become the new Secretary General. Weber had recently made him “Chief of staff” at the party headquarters. This had led to a disagreement between Weber and his Secretary General Bakolas.
Last April, the EU member states agreed on a reform of the EU fiscal rules, which is now taking effect. Finance Minister Christian Lindner in particular had insisted on strict numerical limits – which must now also be applied in Germany. Lindner’s argument: not only the German debt brake, but also the EU fiscal rules would force him to make savings.
However, relying on austerity policy in the current, economically uncertain situation, is not an economic necessity, but a political decision. As representatives of Fiscal Future, an NGO of young people for a sustainable fiscal policy, we therefore have a more differentiated view: The new EU fiscal rules are not a “deliberate own goal” for Lindner’s austerity policy, but a genuine own goal for Germany’s economic future.
Specifically, this concerns the Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA), based on which the EU Commission agrees a net spending path with the member states that exceed the benchmarks. Germany was also supposed to submit a spending plan by October 15. This deadline was not met by the Ministry of Finance. Consideration is now being given to extending the adjustment period from four to seven years – an opt-out option under the new regulations.
Schadenfreude is also coming from Brussels – Germany of all countries , the EU’s model saver, does not have its public finances under control. And Lindner is using the situation as backing in the dispute over the debt brake by pointing out that the new EU fiscal rules are even stricter than the national ones.
But it is not that simple. The fact that Germany is at risk of not adhering to the net expenditure path is not due to government spending addiction, but to anti-growth austerity policies. For the DSA, it is not only the debt level that counts, but above all the growth forecasts. More and more economists are attributing the fact that these are currently so pessimistic to the lack of investment and the restrictive budget policy. For this reason, the IMF has also just adjusted its economic forecast for Germany for 2025 downwards by 0.5 percentage points and has been recommending a relaxation of the debt brake for some time.
Lindner’s logic of “Germany is the sick man of Europe, so we have to make savings” therefore does not apply – and is also not found in the DSA. This is because the condition for extending the adjustment period is that the country must present plans for structural reforms and investments that promote growth and resilience. What is required is precisely the investment policy that Germany needs now – and which the debt brake is blocking.
Nils Redeker from the Jacques Delors Centre therefore recommends that a new government should renegotiate the spending plans after the federal elections and use them as the basis for an ambitious investment policy. Extending the adjustment period from four to seven years is therefore not “detention” because Germany has not “done its homework.” It is an opportunity for a more far-sighted, investment-promoting and therefore also more intergenerationally fair financial policy.
Despite the little additional leeway that the new EU fiscal rules leave, they still fall far short of their original goal: to create a sustainable European financial framework. According to calculations by the New Economic Forum, only three member states will be able to invest sufficiently in the socio-ecological transformation under the new rules.
At the same time, the DSA has also been criticized for lacking transparency and underestimating the negative growth effects of fiscal consolidation. As the Draghi Report has already suggested, the EU will need a credit-financed joint investment program in the long term – a fund for the future – in order to meet the challenges of transformation and new geo-economic realities.
It is clear to us that rigid debt limits jeopardize the room for manoeuvre of future generations – at the national and European level. They must not be used as a political argument to block the necessary investments in the future.