The winners and losers from Europe’s largest party’s big bash

VALENCIA, Spain ― The European People’s Party top brass huddled in Valencia this week to toast their political dominance, and to plot how to keep their firm grim on the EU’s levers of power.

The annual party congress started out on shaky footing, as protests over local authorities’ handling of last year’s deadly Valencia floods threatened to sour celebrations before they’d even begun. In the end, the demonstrations were called off due to the freak power-cut on the Iberian Peninsula — and the EPP big wigs got away with their baffling decision to hold a party in the same conference center that was six months ago used as a makeshift morgue.

But aside from giving officials and politicians an opportunity for some schmoozing and scheming, the EPP congress provided observers with an opportunity to test the temperature of a party undergoing radical change as it seeks to hold off the far right.

So who is up in EPP World, and (more intriguingly) who is down? POLITICO reads the runes.

THE WINNERS

Manfred Weber’s ego

Over the past 12 months, the EPP has cemented its grip on power around Europe and across the three major EU institutions: the European Commission, the Union’s executive branch, the Council, which represents the 27 member countries, and the directly elected Parliament. And Manfred Weber has cemented his grip on power in the EPP.

Weber, the powerful German who reigns over both the umbrella party and the EPP group in the European Parliament, was reelected to lead the party for three more years at the Valencia shindig.

In his celebratory speech, Weber praised the EPP’s transition from being mostly in opposition to becoming Europe’s largest political force.

Heads of government from around the bloc praised Weber’s policy coordination in Brussels. And it’s just the beginning. With party reform approved during the congress, Weber plans to centralize policy-making to set the tone across the EU institutions.

But Weber’s decision to appoint close allies from the European Parliament to some of the party’s top positions has raised eyebrows among heads of government, who really call the shots.

Now, he’ll have one of them keeping a close eye on him, with Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo elected as one of the party’s 10 vice presidents.

Asked why he ran for the post, which is rather less glamorous than his gig running a country, Orpo said: “We need connection between the Council table and [the EPP party] presidency,” noting that most of the other candidates for the vice president positions were MEPs.

Germany’s mojo

Friedrich Merz, the incoming German chancellor whose conservatives belong to the EPP, was effusive at the congress about his country’s great Brussels comeback. (He also took the opportunity to lambast his outgoing Socialist predecessor Olaf Scholz’s absence at the EU decision-making table.)

With Merz’s inauguration likely to reassert Berlin’s authority among the group of Europe’s national leaders, his Christian Democrats will dominate the three key policymaking institutions, given Weber and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen both also hail from the conservatives.

That’s good news for Berlin, but could spell trouble for the rest of the gang. Irish MEP Seán Kelly captured the mood among some MEPs, saying “there is that danger” of German dominance. “It’s up to others to stand up — and this is where we miss the Brits,” Kelly said. “The Brits were never in line with Germany.”

Europe’s populists

Weber vowed to fight the authoritarian wave “eating its way into Europe” by redefining the party’s “narrative” to appeal to voters who may be tempted to back populists on the far-right of the political spectrum.

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.