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In some EU states – Sweden and Italy, for example – EPP member parties cooperate with parties further to the right. And EPP leader Manfred Weber is also looking in this direction. In search of new partners for his weakening party family, he is approaching the ECR parliamentary group, among others, as Markus Grabitz reports. He is said to have met Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni several times in recent months. There is protest against this development – even within his own ranks.
In the EU alone, demand for textiles has increased by 40 percent in just a few decades. More and more, faster and faster – that is often the motto in the industry. People outside the EU, in particular, suffer from the often devastating effects. To reduce the ecological and social footprint, the EU Commission is focusing primarily on recycling textiles. But the corresponding technologies are still in their infancy. Recycling companies face a whole series of obstacles, such as the question of which materials they are dealing with in the first place. Caspar Dohmen and Charlotte Wirth did some research.
Sarah Schaefer
Feature
EPP chief Weber in search of new partners
The EPP member parties are not doing well in the polls. If European elections were held on Sunday, the EPP group in Parliament would drop from 176 to 166 seats, according to a calculation by political scientist Manuel Müller. While the data is still from polls before the corruption scandal involving the Socialist Group came to light, in the snapshot from early December, the EPP member parties are losing ground in Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.
For the EPP, the strongest group in Parliament since 1999, the trend has been downward for decades. At the beginning of the millennium, the EPP accounted for 295 MEPs at times (out of 788); currently, there are 176 EPP MEPs.
Manfred Weber, group leader since 2014 and party leader since the summer, must stop the decline. The EPP can only claim to occupy important posts in the EU and significantly influence legislation from a position of strength.
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