The Way to Number 1
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- 2026
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Abstract
The challenge
My first day as the newly elected secretary general of the European People’s Party (EPP) in October 1994 started with a rather rude welcome. My deputy Guy Korthoudt told me that whatever ideas I had, I should forget them. There was no money. And to underline that point, new paper would not be available—we all had to write on the back of paper that had already been used. The office was situated in rented space close to the Midi railway station in Rue de la Victoire. A visit from German chancellor and CDU party chairman Helmut Kohl would have been impossible given the limited size of both the lift and the staircase.
Politically, it was not looking very bright either. The EPP had lost every single direct election to the European Parliament since 1979 to the Socialists and had just added another defeat that summer. The Italian Christian Democratic party, Democrazia Cristiana, a pillar of the EPP for decades, had dissolved into numerous pieces. Articles were being published about the end of Christian Democracy.
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Inside the EPP there was a long-standing feud over whether or not to cooperate with liberal and conservative parties. This had led to the creation of the European Democrat Union (EDU) as a platform outside the EPP through which to do exactly that. The German and Austrian Christian Democrats were participating in this, as well as the Spanish Partido Popular and the Greek Néa Dimokratía, while the more traditionalist Benelux, Italian, Irish and French Christian Democrats remained vehemently opposed to that idea and practice.
But the EPP had its strong points as well. It was the only European political party headquartered outside the premises of the European Parliament, underlining its proper independence from the parliamentary group. The EPP summits of heads of state and government, which were held ahead of meetings of the European Council, were attractive events given the loyal participation of the German chancellor, the major figure in European politics. Wilfried Martens, as president of both the transnational party and its group in the European Parliament, was fully dedicated and engaged. The EPP worked seriously on political programmes that provided a common base for its member parties and Members of the European Parliament. The beginnings of an opening up to parties of different traditions had been made with the acceptance of the membership of Partido Popular.
Helmut Kohl dissatisfied
Despite this, Kohl, the major political figure within the family, was still not satisfied. He withdrew his political support from Thomas Jansen, the German EPP secretary general until 1994. Kohl held Jansen responsible for the 1992 Athens Programme (see Annex I), which Kohl perceived as an attempt to cement the EPP on a traditionalist line. This would have made opening up to conservative and liberal political forces—similarly to how German Christian Democracy was built after the Second World War—more difficult and thus would have hindered the building of a majority coalition in Europe. As he regularly put it, ‘We have not built Europe to leave it to the socialists.’
In April 1993 Ambassador Bernd Fischer, head of the International Relations Department of the CDU, asked me, on behalf of Kohl, to become deputy secretary general of the EPP. The plan was that Enrico Letta, later prime minister of Italy, would become the secretary general. The idea envisaged was to build a tandem leadership formed of the president of the European Young Christian Democrats, Letta, and myself as the president of the Democrat Youth Community of Europe (DEMYC), the youth organisation of the EDU. Due to the collapse of Democrazia Cristiana, Letta later withdrew his candidacy and indeed did not even show up for the election originally planned for summer 1993—which opened up the space for me.
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At the time I was in charge of foreign, European and defence policy at the CDU central office in Bonn, with responsibility for the party’s advisory bodies in this field. I had also drafted the new CDU party programme on Europe, which had been adopted at the CDU Congress in Düsseldorf in 1992. As chairman of DEMYC and the one responsible for international relations on the national board of the CDU youth organisation, Junge Union, I had ample experience of both programme work and interparty relations, and especially of cooperating with people beyond the boundaries of traditional Christian Democracy. EPP president Wilfried Martens knew and valued me from our joint work on the EPP programme for the European elections in 1994 and seems to have suggested me for the new role to the German chancellor. By the time I had moved to Brussels, I had also successfully prepared the content side of the CDU campaign for the European elections in June 1994.
Quick piecemeal progress
Once I was in the role, some of the necessary progress could be achieved piecemeal.
The Finnish and Swedish permanent observer parties became members of the EPP. This was not without complications: the Swedish party leader, Carl Bildt, feared that joining the EPP fully could unbalance Swedish relations with Germany and Britain given that the British Conservatives were not members of the EPP transnational party. They also insisted that the working methods of the EPP should become more similar to those of the EDU. Even though Norway had voted against EU accession, Høyre became firmly anchored in the EPP.
Programme work remained decisive for the integration process. The 1995 EPP Congress was marked by rather bitter debates about the social market economy, which some of the new entrants linked to socialism. In the EPP, the party programme was voted on democratically based on detailed amendments and majority decisions. This came as a shock to those who were outvoted on issues of critical substance for them. For President Martens and myself, programme work was the basis for solidifying the EPP in its enlarged composition.
As secretary general I proposed to the political bureau that member parties’ associations—such as the youth and women’s associations—should be admitted as members of associations recognised by the EPP. That led to successful negotiations between the European Young Christian Democrats and DEMYC to form a united youth structure, the Youth of the European People’s Party (YEPP), which would become formative for a new generation of leaders such as future prime ministers Frederik Reinfeldt and Leo Varadkar. A comical side effect was that I had to reject my own application for DEMYC to be recognised as the second youth structure of the EPP. The EDU student organisation European Democrat Students was recognised as the student organisation of the EPP.
Kohl wanted the EPP summits to be smaller, limited to key decision-makers—ideally just the prime ministers with the EPP president and secretary general. The solution found instead was to bring together the EPP heads of state and government with the elected members of the presidency of the party. That created the incentive for major opposition leaders to run for vice-president, providing them with easy access to the most important leaders, and strengthened the federal leadership of the EPP. Key future European leaders, such as José Manuel Barroso, were thus immersed into the party.
Financially, the contribution of the EPP Group in the European Parliament was able to be seriously increased, first to one-third of that of the member parties and then to one-half, which—together with their provision of two additional staff members and the contributions of the new member parties—gave the EPP some breathing space. The EPP was able to move into a new headquarters in Rue d’Arlon 67, close to the European Parliament.
Growing the party
How to grow a European political party? In business you would differentiate between internal growth and external growth, which is the result of mergers and acquisitions. During my university education in Witten/Herdecke, especially under Prof. Dr Karl Homann, we had been trained to apply economic concepts to all walks of life outside the economy. Why not look at our membership as having strengths or weaknesses in key political markets?
It became apparent that moving to number one would require a serious increase of representation in both Italy and France because of the numbers of Members of the European Parliament they elect and the weakness of the EPP in those countries. Our representation in Portugal and Denmark also needed strengthening. Furthermore, in view of the upcoming enlargement, the approach towards Central and Eastern Europe could not just focus on traditional Christian or Catholic parties, most of which were not reaching double-digit results in elections.
Political nominalism, the self-definition or political self-identification as belonging to a specific political tradition such as Christian Democrat, conservative, liberal or socialist, had to be replaced in the ever-larger Europe by a party’s ability to sign up to a particular political programme and the space it occupied on the political spectrum.
Christian Democrat self-identification depends upon whether there has been a major church/state conflict in the country’s history. In countries where this has never happened, such as the Nordic countries which are state-church nations—that is, those in which the head of state is also the head of the (Protestant) state church—that was excluded in advance, except for small religious minorities. In France, religious communities had decided not to fight the liberal state in the nineteenth century because they expected the return of the monarchy, which would then have solved the issue.1 In Italy, the experience of Democrazia Cristiana, as the assembly of all Catholics in one political party, nearly independent of political belief, similar to the German Zentrum, had finally failed, but its electorate was still there.
The EPP had to move from the Italian concept of Christian Democracy as all Catholics in one party to the German concept of uniting the Catholic Christian–social tradition with Protestant liberal and conservative ideas, as achieved after the Second World War. Given that the Spanish Partido Popular had also brought together Christian Democrat, conservative and liberal traditions, the strongest political forces inside the EPP were now built like that, while the Italian model had faltered.
This also provided an opportunity to preserve the Christian Democratic genetic code in what was an increasingly secular environment, and to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. Classical Christian Democratic ideas, reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable—such as the social market economy, subsidiarity, the people’s party and federalism—could be preserved outside of a religiously inspired political context in an enlarged programmatic party.
Does the European Parliament have to be Socialist-dominated?
In 1996 I provided Martens with a strategy paper entitled ‘Does the European Parliament Have to Be Socialist-Dominated?’, which was later published in abbreviated form by the British Conservative delegation2 and as a speech in the EPP yearbook for 1997 (see Annex II). It compared our strengths and weaknesses in parliamentary representation to those of the Socialists, which showed that becoming number one would require serious efforts, especially in France, Italy and Portugal, but also in terms of prospective alliances in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, such as Hungary.
Martens decided to present the paper to the EPP summit for a strategic debate about whether to further widen the EPP membership or not, which I was invited to introduce. Strong support from Kohl and the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, was countered by serious criticism from the more traditionalist wing of the party. The question was now openly on the table, but the opportunities needed to be addressed one by one, of which the most divisive proved to be the question of Forza Italia, while progress in Portugal and France proved to be more straightforward.
Portugal
The Portuguese PSD belonged to the liberal political family in Europe but had undergone some internal debate about the best political membership, provoked, among others, by its youth organisation, which invited me to speak at one of their events in Porto. I was then informed that I would also meet party leader Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in Lisbon. Marcelo gave me a long talk about why they wanted to join the EPP and six bottles of excellent red wine—quite difficult to transport back on the plane to Brussels—and the issue was settled. Aznar vacated his seat on the EPP presidency in favour of a certain José Manuel Durão Barroso, and the rest is history.
Italy, or the policy of a common roof
Democrazia Cristiana disintegrated when it was no longer needed as an anti-Communist bulwark following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even before this it had had to contend with its heterogeneous political tendencies through the organisation of correnti, which were subgroups closely linked to individual political leaders.
The political space left by Democrazia Cristiana after 1993 was filled by several smaller successor organisations—namely the PPI, the CDU and the CCD, which were competing for recognition by the EPP—as well as by Forza Italia.
I suggested to Martens that rather than privileging one party over the other, we should provide a common roof for all of them and address a political space rather than an organisational structure that was visibly still very much in flux.
The PPI and the CDU asked the German CDU/CSU delegation leader Günther Rinsche and myself to broker a compromise on who was entitled to use the scudo crociato (crossed shield) party logo and who could use the name Partito Popolare Italiano, which we successfully did with their leaders, Gerardo Bianco and Rocco Buttiglione, on the fringes of an EPP summit in southern France at the end of 1994—and sealed the deal with a glass of champagne from the mini-bar. I visited Pier Ferdinando Casini, the leader of the breakaway CCD, in Rome and invited him to join the EPP, which he did. The three quarrelling successor organisations of Democrazia Cristiana were thus united under a common European roof.
The case of Forza Italia proved much more divisive. I had been told that the outgoing president of the European Parliament, Egon Klepsch, had tried to invite Forza Italia to join the EPP Group after the 1994 elections but had failed to achieve support within the EPP. In 1996 Martens allowed me to meet with Silvio Berlusconi confidentially in Rome, asking me to be in listening mode only. After also having received the green light from the then PPI leader Franco Marini in a meeting in Piazza del Gesù, I did.
These efforts resulted in regular meetings in 1997 with the Forza Italia delegation leader Claudio Azzolini in the presence of a representative of the PPI, EPP Group vice-president Pierluigi Castagnetti. Martens privately discussed the case with Kohl in Bonn but reported back that no clear indication had been given by the chancellor about the road to integration.
Attempts by the French Gaullists, the major Irish party Fianna Fáil and Forza Italia to form a new party to the right of the EPP finally led to decisive action. I sent a two-page fax to Kohl a couple of days before Christmas 1997, informing him of the development, and received his approval to prepare the way for Forza Italia to be integrated into the EPP. An extraordinary meeting of the EPP presidency, organised on 22 January 1998 in St Augustin (see Annex III) by leader of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and EPP vice-president Otfried Hennig, explicitly endorsed the integration of Forza Italia into the EPP Group.
The EPP Group proved strongly divided over the issue. The more traditionalist Christian Democrat members formed a discussion circle, the ‘Athens Group’ (see Annex IV), named after the 1992 Athens Basic Programme, to block the process. The delegation leaders on the other side established a breakfast circle called ‘Sparta’, to which I was invited and which is still in existence. In a secret and tumultuous vote, the Group accepted by a majority the joining of the members of Forza Italia, which also paved the way for the party’s later integration into the EPP. Following their admission, the Forza Italia delegation has proved to be the most loyal in the EPP Group in terms of their voting record. Antonio Tajani has become one of the family’s most respected leaders.
France
Forza Italia joining the EPP Group robbed the French Gaullists of the prospect of establishing their own strong European political party. Meeting the head of cabinet of the RPR party leader Philippe Séguin in early 1999 established a first contact and gave me the opportunity to clarify that the EPP was open to establishing closer relations. The RPR was well known among EPP member parties as an active member of the EDU, and Jacques Chirac had engaged personally and very successfully hosted an EDU party leaders’ meeting in Paris’s city hall.
Finally, in his first period of only a few months as party leader, around the European elections of 1999, Nicolas Sarkozy took the decision. As the new secretary general of the EPP Group, I received his phone call announcing that the RPR would join not only the EPP Group but also the party. He added, ‘not like the British Conservatives’.
The Group now united for the first time all the components of the French centre and centre–right, which preconfigured the creation of the UMP under President Sarkozy. A close confidant of President Jacques Chirac, Joseph Daul, would later take over the leadership of first the EPP Group and then the party.
Tidying up
The political space of Christian Democrats and conservatives in Europe was organisationally divided not only in two, but in three: the European Union of Christian Democrats (EUCD), established in 1965, which also covered the space beyond what is now the EU; the EDU, as a platform for cooperation between Christian Democrats and conservatives; and the EPP, which organised common action in the EU.
The EUCD had gained new importance with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the necessity to identify partners in Central and Eastern Europe, as their countries were on the way to EU membership. At the same time, this allowed the development of partnerships without yet admitting those parties directly into the EPP, given that many party structures were not yet stable, divisions happened and it was difficult to prejudge which party would finally prevail.
In spring 1996 Kohl invited a small circle of EPP leaders into the chancellery in Bonn, including the head of the CDU/CSU delegation in the European Parliament and myself, to discuss party matters. The circle included the likes of Jean-Claude Juncker, whom he lovingly called Junior; Jean-Luc Dehaene; Carl Bildt; Martens; and Aznar. Besides providing an opportunity for Aznar to detail his European convictions, it also served to conclude that the EUCD should now be dissolved. As secretary general of the EUCD as well, it was up to me and EUCD president Wim van Velzen to come up with a plan.
We designed the dissolution of the EUCD as a process of integration into the EPP ahead of the EPP congress in February 1999, but based on individual applications and merit. The stability criteria to be met assured the EPP that these political forces were relatively established. The individual, merit-based process was for real: in the first attempt both the Croatian HDZ as well as the Albanian PDSH failed and therefore had to try again after 1999.
The EDU followed the same path after 1999 under the leadership of President Sauli Niinistö. The Austrian ÖVP, which had invested the most into this cooperation, hosting the executive secretaries Andreas Khol and then Alexis Wintoniak in Vienna, approved the merger through their party leader, Wolfgang Schüssel. Wintoniak, Jori Arvonen (representing the EDU president) and I were asked to deal with the technical aspects of the operation.
The political space of Christian Democrats and conservatives was finally united in a single political organisation. All of them? No, the British Conservatives were left without a structure for European party cooperation and, in 2009, also left the EPP Group, of which they had been increasingly reluctant members for two decades.
The way to Number 1
European elections are decided before, during and after election day. The capacity to build a strong alliance of national parties through ‘mergers and acquisitions’ is decisive. The diverging national histories of developing political self-consciousness makes this a challenging process across the whole political spectrum.
President Macron was ready to join a renamed Renew Group in the European Parliament, but refused to accept the liberal label, which is toxic in France, and therefore stayed out of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) party. The Italian Partito Democratico, a merger of left-wing Christian Democrats with parts of the historical Communist party of Italy, could not agree to self-identify as Socialist and therefore required that the name of the Socialist group in the European Parliament be changed to ‘Socialists and Democrats’ before it would join.
The EPP went through this process first, and probably in the most consistent manner. It has been rewarded by winning six European elections in a row and being the party of the Commission president for five terms under Barroso, Juncker and Ursula von der Leyen, thus leading the continent of Europe.
This is the way to Number 1.
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Klaus Welle
has chaired the Martens Centre’s Academic Council since April 2023. He previously served as chair of DEMYC (1991–4), before going on to serve as secretary general of the EUCD (1994–9), of the EPP (1994–9), of the EPP Group in the European Parliament (1999–2004) and of the European Parliament (2009–22). He is a Guest Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven and a Leader in Residence at the Moynihan Center of the Colin Powell School for Global Leadership in New York.