Broad approval from the SPD and FDP: During the weekend, delegates from both parties greenlit the coalition agreement of the traffic light alliance at special party conventions. For the Liberals, 92.2 percent of the delegates voted in favor; for the SPD even 98.8 percent.
The result of the Greens’ member survey is still to be presented by the party today. If it’s a yes, Olaf Scholz (SPD) can be elected as the new chancellor by the German Bundestag on Wednesday.
The Greens are also expected to agree, so there will likely be no major surprises here. However, the allocation of a post about which Scholz has persistently remained silent so far is eagerly awaited: Who will be the new Minister of Health? The Chancellor-designate plans to announce this today.
The much-vaunted unity of the future CDU/CSU government could soon begin to show cracks in its relations with China. According to media reports, Olaf Scholz signaled to China’s President Xi Jinping well before taking office that he would maintain the China course of his predecessor Angela Merkel (CDU). In the coalition agreement, the Greens and FDP had already pushed through a change of course vis-à-vis the People’s Republic. Read more about this in the news.
Meanwhile, the CDU and CSU are busy looking for their role in the opposition. Angela Merkel’s departure leaves not only an unsettled Union behind that must get used to losing its power. The EPP is also in crisis.
It no longer has a majority in the Council, EPP Group leader Manfred Weber (CSU) is weakened, and a victory for EPP candidate Roberta Metsola in the upcoming EU Parliament Presidency election is by no means certain – to name just a few problems. Brussels correspondent Eric Bonse analyses what is currently going wrong in the party family.
Next Wednesday will be a rainy day for the European People’s Party. If the SPD politician Olaf Scholz is elected Germany’s next chancellor as expected, it won’t just be Angela Merkel (CDU) who loses power after sixteen years. The EPP will also lose ground – with far-reaching consequences for all of Europe.
For years the Christian-conservative party family had determined the fate of the EU and occupied the most important offices. In the European Council, the EU Commission, and the Parliament, the EPP set the tone, and the CDU and CSU benefited particularly from this. But with Merkel’s departure, everything will change.
In the future, Scholz will speak for Germany in the European Council. At the next EU summit on December 16th, the post-Merkel era begins – and with it a new, difficult period for the EPP. Until now, it has set the course together with Merkel at its traditional pre-summit meeting. Now the EPP summit will become a tiny round.
If the German chancellor leaves, only small EU states led by EPP politicians will remain. The most prominent member will then be Greece, truly not a major power in the EU. In total, only nine of 27 member states are still headed by EPP politicians. The three big EU countries Germany, France, and Italy are no longer among them.
In the future, the “big three” will be governed by social democrats, liberals, and non-partisans, with the conservatives left out. For Council President Charles Michel, who chairs the EU summits, this should not be a problem – he himself is a liberal. But it could get lonely for EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU).
Manfred Weber (CSU), the leader of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, must also be worried. Merkel’s departure does not change the distribution of seats. With 178 MEPs, the EPP still has the most seats. But the Social Democrats no longer feel bound by the agreement according to which the EPP is to provide the parliamentary president from 2022.
It would be unfair and inappropriate for the EPP to head two out of three EU institutions (Commission and Parliament), says the SPD. In the S&D group, they are even toying with the idea of reappointing the incumbent David Sassoli. “Nobody is doing anyone any favors here,” clarified the leader of the Socialist Group, the Spaniard Iratxe García Pérez.
A power struggle is raging behind the scenes in the EU Parliament, including the distribution of vice presidents and other posts. The EPP is not as well-positioned as usual. Weber has weakened his position with his announcement that he will not run for David Sassoli’s successor and will instead seek the leadership of the EPP.
In addition, the EPP’s candidate for the post of president of the EU Parliament, Roberta Metsola from Malta, is not without controversy. She was only able to win with the help of the CDU and CSU. Two high-profile liberal MEPs – Esther de Lange from the Netherlands and Othmar Karas from Austria – lost out, causing grumbling in the group.
Moreover, Metsola has spoken out against a fundamental right to abortion. This makes her hardly electable for many members of the left-liberal camp. The outcome of the election of the next parliamentary president, scheduled for mid-January, is open. A victory for the EPP candidate is anything but certain.
But these are not the only problems the conservatives have to contend with. They also seem politically disoriented. For years the EPP aligned itself with the wishes of Merkel and the German Christian Democrats. But already in the dispute over Hungary’s Fidesz party Merkel and her party lost hegemony.
The moderate conservative parties from the Benelux countries rebelled and, in the end, won the day – Fidesz was thrown out of the parliamentary group and the party. Merkel and her party colleagues were too late to distance themselves from Fidesz, only EPP group leader Weber had recognized the signs of the times in time.
Even if the CDU and CSU now hold the reins once more – the dispute over direction continues. After Merkel’s departure, the EPP needs new driving forces. Until recently, it looked as if it could take its cue from Sebastian Kurz. The Austrian was seen as a future-oriented “shooting star” for the conservatives.
But after his abrupt withdrawal from politics, Kurz is no longer a figure of identification either. So now Kurz is gone, Angela Merkel is gone, there is no longer a majority in the Council and no secure majority in Parliament: The EPP, once spoiled by success, will have to reinvent itself. But even in the process, it has found itself on the defensive.
Over the weekend, right-wing populists and nationalists from Hungary, Poland, France, and other countries rehearsed closing ranks. At the “Warsaw Summit,” they called for the formation of a common conservative bloc in the EU. In the past, similar appeals have remained without consequences.
But the EPP is no longer the only party family that appeals to conservative values like the homeland and the nation. And it can no longer present itself as “the” European party that determines the fate of the EU – it is too weak for that after the departure of Merkel and Kurz.
President Emmanuel Macron has gained a new serious rival for the presidential elections in April. Valérie Pécresse, the President of the capital region Île de France, has surprisingly won the online vote of around 140,000 supporters of Les Républicains – the conservative party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
She has been in the spotlight for years as a rival to Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Hidalgo is also a presidential candidate. Together with the far-right Marine Le Pen, three women are running for president.
Five candidates had stood for election among the Republicans, and 54-year-old Pécresse, who likes to wear a bright red blazer to set herself apart from the dark-clad gentlemen, had made it to the runoff along with Congressman Eric Ciotti of southern France. And won handily, with 60.95 percent to 39.05 percent.
This is the first time the Conservatives have nominated a woman. Pécresse declared after her election, “I think of all women in France. I will do everything to triumph.” With her, he said, the “republican right” is back. The Conservatives last provided the president with Nicolas Sarkozy from 2007 to 2012. Politically, she says of herself, “I’m two-thirds Merkel and one-third Thatcher.” She admires Angela Merkel’s pragmatism but wants to be stricter.
The politician has long been no stranger to France, having served as budget and education minister and government spokesperson under Nicolas Sarkozy. She left the conservative party a few years ago because its direction had become too right-wing for her but returned this year.
Pécresse is known as tenacious – and a typical representative of the French elite. She graduated from high school at the age of 16 and, like many French politicians, attended the ENA administrative college. She also studied economics at the elite HEC school. Her great supporter was former President Jacques Chirac, who brought her into the Élysée Palace as an advisor.
She has been President of the Île-de-France region since 2015 and was re-elected in 2021. In the process, she often fought against Anne Hidalgo’s environmental projects and represented the interests of motorists from the surrounding area. She comes from an upper-middle-class family in the luxurious Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, where Nicolas Sarkozy was mayor for a long time and is the mother of three grown-up children.
She thus corresponds to the image of many French women who have a career and several children. She was supported by her husband, the businessman Jérôme Pécresse, to whom she has been married since 1994. There have never been any scandals around Pécresse.
She can be dangerous for Emmanuel Macron. As a woman, she brings a breath of fresh air to the election campaign. Macron won in 2017 because many hoped the newcomer would bring a fresh start to France. Now Pécresse is challenging him. She has a long political career behind her and is very well connected; she is considered a moderate within the Republican spectrum, in contrast to Ciotti, who belongs to the right-wing fringe.
According to media reports, Macron was hoping for Ciotti, who would have been an easier opponent. About Pécresse, those close to him said: “She is the most dangerous of all.” That’s because Pécresse’s voters overlap with those Macron has been courting for years, traditional conservatives. Bruno Jeanbart, vice-president of the Opinionway institute, said she was “a threat” to Macron: “She renews the Republicans: a woman, relatively young in the conservative party, where women have not always had a place. She’s also locally based, one of Emmanuel Macron’s weaknesses.”
During the election campaign, Pécresse had stressed that she wanted to restore “French pride” and described herself as a “woman of order and reformer”. She also spoke out in favor of a strong EU. In the pre-election campaign, the conservatives moved further and further to the right. Pécresse is tougher than Macron on the issues of security policy and immigration; she wants to take stronger action against illegal immigration.
She describes herself as an economic liberal and wants to bring order back into the state budget by cutting 200,000 civil servant jobs. She also wants to push through a pension reform, raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 and abolish the 35-hour week in France. She wants to cut social security contributions so business owners will raise wages and reduce unemployment benefits. She criticized the president, saying, “Emmanuel Macron is only obsessed with pleasing. I’m obsessed with getting things done.”
For the Republicans, however, there is not much room between the far-right and Macron, who has moved further and further to the right. Marine Le Pen stressed that Pécresse had similar positions to Macron and called on disappointed Republican voters to vote for her party. According to polls, Macron was always the favorite, followed by the far-right Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. No matter which Conservative candidate was tested, they were always in fourth place for the first round of voting at the earliest, Pécresse at around 10 percent versus Macron at 25 percent, who has yet to officially declare his candidacy.
But Pécresse still has enough time to catch up. She showed her unity with the defeated Eric Ciotti and wants to make her first official trip as a candidate to the latter’s region around Nice as early as today, accompanied by Ciotti. Thus she makes the bridge between the two camps of the conservatives. Tanja Kuchenbecker
Broad approval from the SPD and FDP: During the weekend, delegates from both parties greenlit the coalition agreement of the traffic light alliance at special party conventions. For the Liberals, 92.2 percent of the delegates voted in favor; for the SPD even 98.8 percent.
The result of the Greens’ member survey is still to be presented by the party today. If it’s a yes, Olaf Scholz (SPD) can be elected as the new chancellor by the German Bundestag on Wednesday.
The Greens are also expected to agree, so there will likely be no major surprises here. However, the allocation of a post about which Scholz has persistently remained silent so far is eagerly awaited: Who will be the new Minister of Health? The Chancellor-designate plans to announce this today.
The much-vaunted unity of the future CDU/CSU government could soon begin to show cracks in its relations with China. According to media reports, Olaf Scholz signaled to China’s President Xi Jinping well before taking office that he would maintain the China course of his predecessor Angela Merkel (CDU). In the coalition agreement, the Greens and FDP had already pushed through a change of course vis-à-vis the People’s Republic. Read more about this in the news.
Meanwhile, the CDU and CSU are busy looking for their role in the opposition. Angela Merkel’s departure leaves not only an unsettled Union behind that must get used to losing its power. The EPP is also in crisis.
It no longer has a majority in the Council, EPP Group leader Manfred Weber (CSU) is weakened, and a victory for EPP candidate Roberta Metsola in the upcoming EU Parliament Presidency election is by no means certain – to name just a few problems. Brussels correspondent Eric Bonse analyses what is currently going wrong in the party family.
Next Wednesday will be a rainy day for the European People’s Party. If the SPD politician Olaf Scholz is elected Germany’s next chancellor as expected, it won’t just be Angela Merkel (CDU) who loses power after sixteen years. The EPP will also lose ground – with far-reaching consequences for all of Europe.
For years the Christian-conservative party family had determined the fate of the EU and occupied the most important offices. In the European Council, the EU Commission, and the Parliament, the EPP set the tone, and the CDU and CSU benefited particularly from this. But with Merkel’s departure, everything will change.
In the future, Scholz will speak for Germany in the European Council. At the next EU summit on December 16th, the post-Merkel era begins – and with it a new, difficult period for the EPP. Until now, it has set the course together with Merkel at its traditional pre-summit meeting. Now the EPP summit will become a tiny round.
If the German chancellor leaves, only small EU states led by EPP politicians will remain. The most prominent member will then be Greece, truly not a major power in the EU. In total, only nine of 27 member states are still headed by EPP politicians. The three big EU countries Germany, France, and Italy are no longer among them.
In the future, the “big three” will be governed by social democrats, liberals, and non-partisans, with the conservatives left out. For Council President Charles Michel, who chairs the EU summits, this should not be a problem – he himself is a liberal. But it could get lonely for EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU).
Manfred Weber (CSU), the leader of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, must also be worried. Merkel’s departure does not change the distribution of seats. With 178 MEPs, the EPP still has the most seats. But the Social Democrats no longer feel bound by the agreement according to which the EPP is to provide the parliamentary president from 2022.
It would be unfair and inappropriate for the EPP to head two out of three EU institutions (Commission and Parliament), says the SPD. In the S&D group, they are even toying with the idea of reappointing the incumbent David Sassoli. “Nobody is doing anyone any favors here,” clarified the leader of the Socialist Group, the Spaniard Iratxe García Pérez.
A power struggle is raging behind the scenes in the EU Parliament, including the distribution of vice presidents and other posts. The EPP is not as well-positioned as usual. Weber has weakened his position with his announcement that he will not run for David Sassoli’s successor and will instead seek the leadership of the EPP.
In addition, the EPP’s candidate for the post of president of the EU Parliament, Roberta Metsola from Malta, is not without controversy. She was only able to win with the help of the CDU and CSU. Two high-profile liberal MEPs – Esther de Lange from the Netherlands and Othmar Karas from Austria – lost out, causing grumbling in the group.
Moreover, Metsola has spoken out against a fundamental right to abortion. This makes her hardly electable for many members of the left-liberal camp. The outcome of the election of the next parliamentary president, scheduled for mid-January, is open. A victory for the EPP candidate is anything but certain.
But these are not the only problems the conservatives have to contend with. They also seem politically disoriented. For years the EPP aligned itself with the wishes of Merkel and the German Christian Democrats. But already in the dispute over Hungary’s Fidesz party Merkel and her party lost hegemony.
The moderate conservative parties from the Benelux countries rebelled and, in the end, won the day – Fidesz was thrown out of the parliamentary group and the party. Merkel and her party colleagues were too late to distance themselves from Fidesz, only EPP group leader Weber had recognized the signs of the times in time.
Even if the CDU and CSU now hold the reins once more – the dispute over direction continues. After Merkel’s departure, the EPP needs new driving forces. Until recently, it looked as if it could take its cue from Sebastian Kurz. The Austrian was seen as a future-oriented “shooting star” for the conservatives.
But after his abrupt withdrawal from politics, Kurz is no longer a figure of identification either. So now Kurz is gone, Angela Merkel is gone, there is no longer a majority in the Council and no secure majority in Parliament: The EPP, once spoiled by success, will have to reinvent itself. But even in the process, it has found itself on the defensive.
Over the weekend, right-wing populists and nationalists from Hungary, Poland, France, and other countries rehearsed closing ranks. At the “Warsaw Summit,” they called for the formation of a common conservative bloc in the EU. In the past, similar appeals have remained without consequences.
But the EPP is no longer the only party family that appeals to conservative values like the homeland and the nation. And it can no longer present itself as “the” European party that determines the fate of the EU – it is too weak for that after the departure of Merkel and Kurz.
President Emmanuel Macron has gained a new serious rival for the presidential elections in April. Valérie Pécresse, the President of the capital region Île de France, has surprisingly won the online vote of around 140,000 supporters of Les Républicains – the conservative party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
She has been in the spotlight for years as a rival to Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Hidalgo is also a presidential candidate. Together with the far-right Marine Le Pen, three women are running for president.
Five candidates had stood for election among the Republicans, and 54-year-old Pécresse, who likes to wear a bright red blazer to set herself apart from the dark-clad gentlemen, had made it to the runoff along with Congressman Eric Ciotti of southern France. And won handily, with 60.95 percent to 39.05 percent.
This is the first time the Conservatives have nominated a woman. Pécresse declared after her election, “I think of all women in France. I will do everything to triumph.” With her, he said, the “republican right” is back. The Conservatives last provided the president with Nicolas Sarkozy from 2007 to 2012. Politically, she says of herself, “I’m two-thirds Merkel and one-third Thatcher.” She admires Angela Merkel’s pragmatism but wants to be stricter.
The politician has long been no stranger to France, having served as budget and education minister and government spokesperson under Nicolas Sarkozy. She left the conservative party a few years ago because its direction had become too right-wing for her but returned this year.
Pécresse is known as tenacious – and a typical representative of the French elite. She graduated from high school at the age of 16 and, like many French politicians, attended the ENA administrative college. She also studied economics at the elite HEC school. Her great supporter was former President Jacques Chirac, who brought her into the Élysée Palace as an advisor.
She has been President of the Île-de-France region since 2015 and was re-elected in 2021. In the process, she often fought against Anne Hidalgo’s environmental projects and represented the interests of motorists from the surrounding area. She comes from an upper-middle-class family in the luxurious Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, where Nicolas Sarkozy was mayor for a long time and is the mother of three grown-up children.
She thus corresponds to the image of many French women who have a career and several children. She was supported by her husband, the businessman Jérôme Pécresse, to whom she has been married since 1994. There have never been any scandals around Pécresse.
She can be dangerous for Emmanuel Macron. As a woman, she brings a breath of fresh air to the election campaign. Macron won in 2017 because many hoped the newcomer would bring a fresh start to France. Now Pécresse is challenging him. She has a long political career behind her and is very well connected; she is considered a moderate within the Republican spectrum, in contrast to Ciotti, who belongs to the right-wing fringe.
According to media reports, Macron was hoping for Ciotti, who would have been an easier opponent. About Pécresse, those close to him said: “She is the most dangerous of all.” That’s because Pécresse’s voters overlap with those Macron has been courting for years, traditional conservatives. Bruno Jeanbart, vice-president of the Opinionway institute, said she was “a threat” to Macron: “She renews the Republicans: a woman, relatively young in the conservative party, where women have not always had a place. She’s also locally based, one of Emmanuel Macron’s weaknesses.”
During the election campaign, Pécresse had stressed that she wanted to restore “French pride” and described herself as a “woman of order and reformer”. She also spoke out in favor of a strong EU. In the pre-election campaign, the conservatives moved further and further to the right. Pécresse is tougher than Macron on the issues of security policy and immigration; she wants to take stronger action against illegal immigration.
She describes herself as an economic liberal and wants to bring order back into the state budget by cutting 200,000 civil servant jobs. She also wants to push through a pension reform, raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 and abolish the 35-hour week in France. She wants to cut social security contributions so business owners will raise wages and reduce unemployment benefits. She criticized the president, saying, “Emmanuel Macron is only obsessed with pleasing. I’m obsessed with getting things done.”
For the Republicans, however, there is not much room between the far-right and Macron, who has moved further and further to the right. Marine Le Pen stressed that Pécresse had similar positions to Macron and called on disappointed Republican voters to vote for her party. According to polls, Macron was always the favorite, followed by the far-right Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. No matter which Conservative candidate was tested, they were always in fourth place for the first round of voting at the earliest, Pécresse at around 10 percent versus Macron at 25 percent, who has yet to officially declare his candidacy.
But Pécresse still has enough time to catch up. She showed her unity with the defeated Eric Ciotti and wants to make her first official trip as a candidate to the latter’s region around Nice as early as today, accompanied by Ciotti. Thus she makes the bridge between the two camps of the conservatives. Tanja Kuchenbecker
