mobanmarketHELSINKI — The way Joseph Daul often tells it, he’s just a small-town farmer, raising cattle and tending sugar beet on his family’s modest plot of land in French Alsace, not far from the German border.
He’s also one of the most powerful people in the EU, who commands the attention of presidents and prime ministers, with a direct line to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Daul, the 71-year-old president of the European People’s Party (EPP), is virtually unknown outside Brussels — and he prefers it that way. But this week, Daul’s influence is on rare public display as he presides over a party congress in Helsinki, at which the EPP, a powerful alliance of center-right parties, will choose its nominee to be the next European Commission president. The party congress is a crucial moment for Europe’s establishment party as it struggles to maintain its footing in an anti-establishment era.
Daul has faced criticism from political opponents who accuse him of being too soft on populists within the EPP, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has championed the idea of an “illiberal democracy” and railed against EU institutions. He also annoyed some EPP members by rejecting calls for a series of debates between the two contenders for the Commission nomination, a move that favored German frontrunner Manfred Weber over the only other contender, Alexander Stubb of Finland.
But Daul enjoys broad support in the EPP for his cautious and pragmatic approach — geared above all toward maintaining the party’s status as the Continent’s dominant political machine.
At the start of the congress, he acknowledged that opponents will try to portray the EPP as the tired old establishment that needs to be swept away at next year’s European Parliament election. But he said they lack an alternative vision.
“I know that all our competitors will all be against the EPP, the old Europe,” he said. “And the slogan of the others will be: We want a new Europe. Once they’ve said it, there is a question mark: What type of Europe you want? We at the EPP are the founding fathers of Europe. We don’t want to be ashamed of what we have achieved in the past 70 years in Europe and we are proud of this heritage.”
EU in his DNA
The chubby farmer-turned-politician, who often looks squeezed into his suits like a human saucisse de campagne, has steered the EPP with what both friends and foes describe as a deft touch for backroom negotiations, making use of his fluent French and German, and his unparalleled access to Merkel, Europe’s most influential national leader. As a native of Strasbourg, the official seat of the European Parliament, Daul seems to have the EU coded directly into his DNA. And as a farmer from Alsace, he comes from a place where Franco-German integration is not a political affectation, but rooted in the soil and nourished by the Rhine River.
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“Daul takes his orders from Merkel,” one senior member of the EPP said on condition of anonymity. “Merkel has few confidants, but outside Germany, he is the closest one.”
Daul’s admirers — including those from outside his party — say he is a bridge-builder who keeps his word.
“Politicians like Joseph Daul, who seek compromises and moderate tones, are needed more than ever, to constitute a positive force in modern politics,” said Martin Schulz, the former German Social Democrat leader and ex-European Parliament president.
Schulz said Daul has “strong conservative principles. As a Social Democrat, I do not share many of them. But Joseph Daul is a very ethical person and someone you can always rely on.”
Juncker backer
Daul was one of the architects of the so-called Spitzenkandidat or “lead candidate” process first used by the EU in 2014 to choose the Commission president. And he is widely credited with persuading Merkel that year to drop her opposition to Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Luxembourg prime minister who had won the EPP nomination but faced resistance from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
“Sometimes our colleagues from the German delegation will be jealous, because he is received by Merkel every month,” said Paolo Rangel, a Portuguese vice president in the EPP group in the European Parliament who wrote a lengthy article about Daul in 2014, lauding him as a great European. “Everybody knows for instance that if Juncker is now president of the Commission it is because he fought for this,” Rangel said.
This time around, Daul is widely viewed as both a defender of the Spitzenkandidat process but also as the main force preventing it from evolving into true primary-type election campaign. That is the type of campaign that Stubb, a former Finnish prime minister, wants — but it would have been risky for Weber, the front-runner and leader of the EPP group in the European Parliament.
In that regard, Daul is seen as a defender of the status quo, and also of the EPP establishment, which has rallied round Weber — even though he has never held any executive office. For some EPP members, that means Daul has failed to heed the message from voters demanding change in recent national elections, in which center-right parties have haemorrhaged votes even in countries like Germany where they still finish first.
“In 2019, with all the threats coming from the U.S., the rise of Euroskepticism, there is a need to renew the role of politicians,” said the MEP who spoke about Daul’s close ties to Merkel. “People want to listen to something different.”
Although Daul has not made a public endorsement in the EPP’s nominating contest, many in the party believe him to be an ardent supporter of Weber, who succeeded him as leader of the party’s group in the Parliament. One EPP official described Daul’s ties to Weber as a “father-and son” relationship.
Farmers’ friend
Though he represents the old guard of the EU, Daul is different — at least in the sense that he is hardly a traditional elite politician.
Daul built his career primarily as a cattle farmer and a fierce defender of French farmers, presiding over different agricultural associations and trade unions. He also spent years in Alsatian politics, including as mayor of his village Pfettisheim. He was first elected to the European Parliament in 1999 and won praise from colleagues as chairman of the committee on agriculture and rural development.
Werner Langen, a German MEP from the EPP, said Daul was not part of the Paris political intelligentsia but was accepted by everyone, including the France’s former presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande.
“It’s not about establishment or anti-establishment,” Langen said. “Daul does politics in a realistic way,” he said. “It’s about compromise, negotiations on the same level and promoting the same values.”
Langen said Daul’s Alsatian identity was very important to him. He recalled how Daul once described France as a “country between Brittany and Alsace.”
“He is very, very influential and strong man, with very strong convictions, very pro-European,” said Rangel, the Portuguese MEP. “But he is always very humble and he speaks as if his main concern was the weather in the next weekend in Strasbourg where his farm can be effective or not, if things go good or not.”
Daul took over the Europe-wide leadership of the EPP in 2013, when its longtime leader, the former Belgian prime minister, Wilfred Martens, was gravely ill with cancer. He was officially elected as president after Martens’ death the following year.
In a brief interview with POLITICO on Wednesday, Daul said he has tried to lead the EPP with a mostly gentle, parental hand.
“I try to keep the family together and to run it like a good father, and that’s what I’ve always tried to do,” Daul said. “But the father needs to get angry sometimes.”
Later in the day, he returned to the family metaphor in describing his relationship with Orbán. “In every family there is an enfant terrible,” he said, declaring he prefers “to keep my enfant terrible inside the family.”
Colleagues say Daul’s decision to stick with Orbán and other moves further back — such as welcoming Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia into the EPP — have been driven by a desire to keep the alliance as large as possible, even at the expense of ideological cohesion.
“He’s not the guy who will kick anyone out from the party,” an official from the European Parliament said. “He wants to continue to lead the biggest political group in Europe.”