Former European Commission president rebels against the European People’s Party’s shift to the far right

The former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, issues a warning to his party, the European People’s Party (EPP), and his successor, Ursula von der Leyen: “It would be a good idea for the EPP to stay away from being too right-wing. And I would also warn against any formal alliance with far-right parties. This is the message that the Luxembourg politician, who comes from the popular family of the centrist Christian Social Popular Party (CVS), has sent to his fellow members, who have opened the door to the extreme right for the future distribution of power in the EU and have considerably hardened their positions on issues such as migration.

“I have noticed a shift to the right within the EPP, which I fight against. Anyone who leans too far to the right risks falling out of the window,” Juncker explains in an interview in Luxemburger Wort: “If traditional parties start to speak like populists on the right, the boundaries between established populist parties and the far right will disappear. Even in public perception. Democracy can only lose.”

Juncker, who presided over the European Commission between 2014 and 2019 and was previously prime minister of Luxembourg for almost two decades, does not rule out that von der Leyen would be elected with the votes of the extreme right of the ECR (the group of Jo Vox or Giorgia Meloni by Fratelli d’Italia), but he slips that the normal thing is that she did so without having reached specific agreements with them, but because they identify with her program, as happened ten years ago with some green or green MEPs on the left.

The Luxembourg politician has also rebelled against the generalisation that includes the structures of his political family, including von der Leyen, but also previously the head of the EPP, Manfred Weber, and now Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Meloni. “I have to admit that, against all the odds, Giorgia Meloni’s party is pursuing a largely pro-European line. But we also have to take into account what the parties said before coming to power. And the vision of humanity they represent. That cannot be completely denied,” he says.

Juncker, under whose mandate the mandatory distribution of refugee quotas was proposed amid the migrant crisis caused by the war in Syria, also questions the hardening of the EPP’s position in this regard in full competition with the extreme right. Although he assures that the immigration policy is the one that remains black on white in the Migration Treaty – which in itself implies a toughening of the conditions for asylum and allows payments for the rejection of refugees -, he charges against the possibility that his party defends the ‘Rwanda model’ implemented in the United Kingdom, which allows asylum seekers to be expelled to third countries until their requests are resolved, and which appears in its electoral program. “I don’t like that. I would prefer that asylum procedures take place where you arrive. Otherwise, it gives the impression that everything is being done to keep refugees as far away from European borders as possible,” he explains.