Manfred Weber, cousin and brother-in-law of all rights

2023-05-01 07:00:40

Manfred Weberhe Chairman of the European People’s Party, is perfectly clear who are the reactionary leaders of the new populist authoritarianism outside Europe -from Putin to Bolsonaro- and they deserve all his censorship. The reactionary leaders of the new European populist authoritarianism, however, are a different matter. It is Weber, precisely, who may end up representing a change in the strategy of the traditional right-wing (conservatives, Christian democrats and liberals) in the space of the European Union. In large part, Weber’s presidency is the result of the fears of the traditional right in the face of the growth of the extreme right and what they call the populist radical right.

Despite having founded his own company at a very young age, a few years after graduating as an engineer, Manfred Weber is a professionalized politician from head to toe and from the soul to the smile. At the age of 23 he was already a member of the Bavarian legislature. At barely 50 years old, he has already been in the European Parliament.

has never managed anything, neither at the head of a Ministry nor of a Commissariat, but very few deputies know the European Parliament as well as Weber, its formal and informal mechanisms, its ‘labyrinthine’ negotiations to draw up pacts and majorities. Because in Strasbourg practically everything is negotiated.

When, as a result of the 2008 crisis, it was decided to impose budget cuts and a fierce control of public spending, the center-right and the center-left endorsed it. When it was decided in 2020 to inject monstrous amounts of money into programs aimed at maintaining business activity and revitalizing and modernizing national economies after the pandemicwas done through the consensus of both groups, the same as suspending the fiscal rules.

That is why it is so grotesque to hear the left in Spain -it happens almost exclusively in Spain- claiming the European solutions applied in 2020-2021 compared to those imposed in the 2008 crisis. On both occasions there was a very high consensus among the main parliamentary groups. The strategy in the face of the post-pandemic crisis does not correspond to right-wing or left-wing parliamentary groups, to an ideological or group majority. Is a european strategy.

Since he was 32 years old, Weber has shown tenacity ability to understand, especially, with his co-religionists from the center and north of the continent. He is patient, he likes to bathe himself almost literally in information, he is coldly devoured by political passion.

The leader of the European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, speaks in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. EFE

It should also recognize that his long installation in Parliament is due to the crisis of his party, the Christian Social Union, in the richest state in Germany. The USC is no longer the indestructible tower that dominated Bavarian politics for decades. His great opportunity arose in 2018, when he opted to succeed Juan Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission. He didn’t get it.

At the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel he supported his former Defense Minister and former Social Affairs Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, who finally took power in December 2019. The new president was much more moderate than the EPP spokesperson. For the Bavarians, almost a red. Weber turned to another great cause of hers, practically answering a question: what can the European democratic right do in the face of the far right growth? How to fight it? What’s more, can it be fought? Wouldn’t it be better to surround her?

Weber had a hard time convicting the prime minister of Hungary, an evil beast called Viktor Orbán. It has recently supported the Government of Giorgia Meloni, which he jokingly described as center-right. In recent times he has defended, like a gentleman, the PP and his government in Andalusia, slipping explicit accusations against Pedro Sánchez and his team regarding the battle of Donana.

Trivialize the far right, playing semantics like tute, understanding new nationalisms: anything goes so that the PPE does not lose heart. Weber it’s a danger so dapper that perhaps he doesn’t even know it.