Gest post by Ted Malloch author of Davos, Aspen and Yale
Have you ever heard of the boring German, Manfred Weber?
Probably not, as he is a no body: despite leading the EU-wide list for the biggest party, only 25% of voters in his own country knew who he was.
He is in fact, the Bavarian CSU party hack with no elected political or executive level experience whothat heads up the EU’s European Peoples Party (EPP) grouping in Strasbourg and Brussels.
Wow…
He was Chancellor Merkel’s crony and is was until recently supposed to be forced on the rest of Europe as the replacement for Jean-Claude Juncker, the inept and drunken President of the European Commission (also her crony).
Needless to say, he’s not looking so hot all of a sudden.
After a dismal performance in the May EU elections everything is now up for grabs.
French President Macron refuses to – go along and get along – and wants to impose his own, yes, French President,own new European President – even though he lost in France to Marine Le Pen in the same European parliamentary elections.
Unfortunately, dBut democracy is not the EU’s thing.
The backstabbing and cigar filled rooms have just started and the outcome for all the top, “plum” functionary jobs is a mystery—with lots of horse-trading expected and on-going.
WeaklingBut the lackluster Weber, the supposedly crowned successor, is already a dead duck.
Thise Euro-federalist is wildly in favor of more integration and power going to the Brussels mob but his qualifications frankly: stink.
Just for the record, the Council President, Donald Tusk (a Pole who is also getting replaced) Just for the record received a letter (here below)w is the letter heWeber sent him to the Council President, Donald Tusk, over a year ago making yours truly Persona Non Grata (PNG) – a diplomatic phrase declining credentials when President Trump floated my name to be his US Ambassador to the EU. When a diplomat gets PNG’d, they’re deported within days.
No Eurosceptics need apply, he said, and Ted Malloch is “the most feared man in Europe” since he malevolently wants to tear down our house.
Well, I did, and said so on TV. I also referred to it as the EUSSR, which they didn’t like.
Weeberll, now he seems to have gotten his own just reward.
Recent developments in the European Pparliament put pause to this game: The unpopular Spitzenkandidat system to select presidential candidates for the Commission was forced through, against the will of both Macron and Eurosceptic forces.
If Euro-federalism was ever going to be victorious, it seemsa necessary condition would be for the Strasbourg political class to inevitable that the Brussels political class would stage this sort of power grab eventually.
In theory, the Spitzenkandidat system cements in place the current party order – making the European Parliament’s Cordon Sanitaire stronger– but the ever-stronger eurosceptic movement is having the last laugh.
In practice, it trying to force through Spitzenkandidats leads to the fracturing of the seven-party system: even his native Germany is shopping around for better alternatives. The fact that Merkel, or her successor, has to personally nominate him in the Council is a procedural hurdle he is unlikely to clear..
Party Consolidation consolidation is logical for many reasons, on both the left and right.
An uncharacteristically outspoken German (who happens to be his party’s Spitzenkandidat), this Herr Weber, lead the ruling Parliamentary plurality.
But at the drop of a coin, the same, Manfred Weber of the EPP, has lost the Euro-federalist fight in a Council brawl.
President Juncker (also of the centrist EPP – and the only victorious Spitzenkandidat in history) sided with Weber Weber but lost butand was able to muscle in his own Chief of Staff, Martin Selmayr, another autocratic German, into the powerful top civil servant position in the Commission (to loud protests from lesser parties, especially the Greens).
Now that the crony Spitzenkandidat system has reached the Council, it is clear that Macron has sided against the procedure – a vote that sees him on the same side of a major European issue with the Italian, Polish and Hungarian Eurosceptics for the second time since Macron’s inauguration
In other words, the European Union’s internal contradiction go stinks from the top down and the bottom up. Any similarities with the defunct USSR are purely coincidental, I’m sure. It is falling of its own dead weight and can’t even choose a leader.
