Donald Tusk is poised to swap one tricky European presidency for another.
After five years as European Council president, the former Polish prime minister is now the unchallenged candidate to lead the European People’s Party, the center-right political family that has dominated the EU for more than 40 years.
In some ways, running the EPP should be much less fraught than trying to cajole leaders from 28 different EU member countries into common positions on everything from Brexit to budgets as Council president. The EPP is, after all, much more ideologically homogeneous, and it remains the Continent’s preeminent political alliance.
Yet the party — the political home of German Chancellors Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl, of current and future Commission Presidents Jean-Claude Juncker and Ursula von der Leyen — is in the grip of something of an identity crisis. Its fortunes have declined in recent years, and its grip on power in the EU has slipped as the Continent’s political landscape has become more complex and diverse.
If, as expected, Tusk replaces Joseph Daul — a powerful but nearly invisible former French MEP and consummate backroom player who shuns attention and is something of a relic in the era of Twitter and Instagram — he will be charged with breathing new life into a respected but struggling political brand.
The party’s first-place finish in May’s European Parliament election was less a cause for celebration than for introspective consternation, as it was accompanied by the loss of 35 seats.
There were times during the campaign when its formidable, unrivaled war machine seemed to lack leadership and direction. The EPP, long the “popular” party, struggled for public appeal as it faced challenges on multiple fronts: its traditional center-left opponents, liberals boosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, surging Greens and far-right nationalists.
The conservatives are now scrambling to show they are as concerned about climate change as the Greens, and as eager as the liberals for rejuvenation and reform of the EU, including a revamp of the failed lead candidate or Spitzenkandidat process for choosing the European Commission president.
It is both to Tusk’s personal advantage and the party’s great disadvantage that he has no serious challenger in sight ahead of a party congress in Zagreb next month that will choose Daul’s successor. The party’s ranks have been depleted not just in the European Parliament but also among national leaders.
Among the Western European powers that founded that EU, only Germany has a leader from the EPP: Merkel, who is in the twilight of her career. Meanwhile, the young Austrian, Sebastian Kurz, is still working to get back into government after a coalition collapse, which leaves Ireland, Greece, Croatia and Latvia with the most prominent non-German conservatives in national capitals.
Tusk himself is still eyeing a possible campaign for president of Poland next year. But the strength of the ruling nationalists in his home country suggests that could be an uphill struggle.
So for now, at least, Tusk has eagerly accepted the EPP nomination, and the party seems equally keen to have a president whose name and face are recognized across Europe, often for his provocative statements in opposition to Brexit. Another candidate could still emerge before nominations close on November 13 but there’s no sign of one so far.
“I don’t see anything that goes against Tusk’s candidacy,” one senior EPP insider said. “I think everybody would be happy.”
Unpopular with populists
As a former anti-communist activist and the longest-serving prime minister of Poland, Tusk is likely to differentiate himself from Daul, a cattle farmer who often acted as a background operator close to both the centrist Merkel and her nationalist nemesis within the party, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Daul was often accused of being too soft on populists within the EPP, particularly Orbán. Tusk, by contrast, is the sworn enemy of Poland’s populist governing Law and Justice party, and is expected to be far tougher.
Tusk is also expected to cement the EPP’s Christian Democrat roots, while also serving as a symbol of how European conservatism has shifted markedly to the east in recent years.
“He is not going to be a German worshipper,” the EPP insider said.
If the Kohl era marked Germany’s emergence as the unrivaled economic and political leader in the EU, the Tusk era could well mark the solidification of the EU’s expansion into the former communist bloc. It’s a period of transition, marked by pervasive tensions between East and West, and some say the EPP’s ability to reconcile the two sides will be the key signal of whether the EU as a whole can hold together.
For the first time in the EPP group’s history, Eastern European MEPs now outnumber their Spanish and French colleagues, giving parties like Tusk’s Civic Platform and Romania’s National Liberal Party power and influence that they rarely enjoyed before.
Last year, Tusk made clear at an EPP congress in Helsinki that “If you want to replace the Western model of liberal democracy with an Eastern model of ‘authoritarian democracy,’ you are not a Christian Democrat.”
“I would like to believe that all of us here wish to remain faithful to the ideals of the true Christian Democracy,” he added.
However, Christian Democracy seems to be a declining political force, with Christianity far less in fashion in Western countries, and democracy being tested in eastern countries like Hungary and Poland.
The question for Tusk is whether Europe has already passed peak EPP.
The alliance has 84 member parties across Europe and nine European leaders including Merkel, Orbán and recent addition Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Greece. Its group is the largest in the European Parliament. Since the ’90s, the EPP has provided the vast majority of European Commission presidents.
However, in the European election in May, member parties of the EPP lost ground in almost every major European country. In the European Parliament, the EPP faction fell to 182 members from 217. Though three candidates are still to be nominated for the new von der Leyen Commission, the EPP looks set to hold only about half the 14 commissioner posts it held at the start of Juncker’s term in 2014.
“It’s not the end of a hegemony,” said Esteban Gonzáles Pons, a Spanish MEP who is a vice chair of the EPP group in the European Parliament. “The EPP still is the biggest party in Europe, and still is the party that better represents the feeling and the thinking of Europeans.”
However, “it’s clear that the world has changed and the EPP has to change as well,” Gonzáles Pons added. “We are an old party with old principles and values, and we have to adapt our party to the present and the future.” He added that the party needs to answer “ideological contradictions,” including its relationship with the far right.
“We have to decide if we are going to work with extreme-right parties or to turn our back on them,” he said, citing EPP parties in countries like Austria, which decided to govern with the far right.
Another pressing question regards Orbán. The Hungarian leader’s Fidesz party was suspended from the EPP in March on the basis that it was not sticking to the EPP’s values. But its MEPs remain part of the EPP group in the European Parliament.
Some officials are pressing for a definitive decision of whether Fidesz belongs in the fold by the time the EPP holds its Zagreb congress, where Tusk will likely be anointed as president.
New green dream?
On climate policy, some EPP leaders have been urging the party to get greener, quickly.
“What’s starting to happen is that green doesn’t mean left, green can also be right,” Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast in a recent interview. He suggested the EPP should embrace climate-friendly policies, as they were a way to both do the right thing for the planet and for businesses to make money.
Kariņš had a warning for the EPP. “Things that don’t evolve tend to be things that are dead,” he said. “Languages that don’t change are dead languages. Parties that don’t evolve are in the history books.”
At the Zagreb congress, the EPP will discuss how to lead the revamp of the Spitzenkandidat process, including perhaps a mechanism to encourage sitting prime ministers to run for Commission president — something national leaders historically have been reluctant to do.
Many in the EPP are still bitter about the way national leaders on the European Council cast aside Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead candidate, and instead appointed von der Leyen, also an EPP member, to the EU’s top executive post. There is concern within the EPP that the new Commission president might choose to keep her own party at a distance, given the need for a broader coalition in the European Parliament to move legislation.
EPP officials said they are confident that von der Leyen ultimately would recognize that she needs allies in her own political family, and that they are the only ones she can trust to put her agenda into action.
Tusk is well positioned to be one of those allies, as an already well-known figure in Brussels — unlike von der Leyen.
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He has often sought to convince others by recalling his own powerful personal narrative, as a Polish citizen whose country fought for EU membership.
“I remember the first time when I started to dream about a European future for my country, I think I was maybe a 30- or 35-year-old guy then,” Tusk told reporters last week. “And I had to wait more than twenty-five years for this.”
Tusk made those remarks after failing to persuade Macron to stop blocking the start of EU membership talks for the Balkan countries of Albania and North Macedonia.
He’ll be hoping for more luck getting his own party on side in his next presidential role.
David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.