A year before the election, Europe’s Christian and Social Democrats are stuck in bribery and leadership crises.
“A visit”: this is how the press office of the European People’s Party (EPP) described the raid on its Brussels headquarters near the European Parliament in a broadcast on Tuesday afternoon. The reason for this “visit” was the ongoing investigation by the Erfurt public prosecutor’s office against the head of the CDU Thuringia, Mario Voigt, on suspicion of corruption. As head of the EPP’s digital election campaign in the run-up to the 2019 European elections, he is said to have placed an order with a digital agency in Jena and received 17,000 euros for it. The public prosecutor’s office had already carried out house searches at Voigt in Thuringia in October. He denies all allegations and is presumed innocent. The name of the agency is known to the “Presse”, a request for comment made on Tuesday remained unanswered until Thursday.
For Manfred Weber, the President of the EPP, this affair is a real problem one year before the next European elections. Because he had personally chosen Voigt in 2019 to coordinate his party’s internet election campaign across Europe. Above all, an app called “Connect”, which the CDU had already used in 2014 in the Thuringian state parliament and in 2017 in the federal election campaign to network sympathizers with each other and to provide them with arguments and positions on party lines for debates in private circles and at the regulars’ table , Voigt should roll out in all member states across Europe. However, this caused an alarm in 2021 because of its insufficiently secured handling of user data. In the meantime, the CDU has deleted them.