Not many people dare openly challenge the outward harmony of the centre-right European People’s Party.
While Europe’s most powerful party family is no stranger to backstabbing and hostile briefings, it is good at presenting a well-oiled, hierarchical front.
Its 2025 congress was proof of the tight grip that the ubiquitous president Manfred Weber has over the national members with their many diverging interests, with Weber himself securing re-election at a stable 89% for the second time in a row.
It was all the more unusual that one of the party’s own vice-presidents broke the precedent just before the party’s harmony-fest congress in Valencia.
The criticism of Andrzej Halicki, chair of the EPP’s Polish delegates in the European Parliament and re-elected as VP in Valencia on Wednesday, was subtle enough. But when he briefed journalists that working with far-right parties “on the small details… does not make sense”, it could only be read as a criticism of Weber’s strategy in dealing with the far right.
The president had coined the phrase that the EPP would only work with “pro-European, pro-Ukrainian, and pro-rule-of-law” forces, which opened the party to cooperating with the nationalist European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR), that is considered beyond the pale by some.
One EPP source said the comments angered EPP HQ. It was hardly a coincidence when Weber came out swinging with an interview in the FT, shortly after, in which he reasserted that he was not at all opening the party up to the far right.
It was neither the first nor the last time that Halicki “vocally represented Polish positions”, as one EPP MEP diplomatically put it.
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