Weber’s firewall wobbles | Euractiv

You’re reading Rapporteur on Monday 18 May. Eddy Wax here, en route to Strasbourg (say hi), with Nicoletta Ionta in Brussels.

Need-to-knows:

🟢 EPP figures eyeing far-right alliances

🟢 Italy and Spain’s UN food fight

🟢 A pivotal week for Greenland

From the capital

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of the cordon sanitaire creaking. Some say the invisible firewall blocking the far-right from power in the European Parliament is already a thing of the past. Manfred Weber, leader of the centre-right European People’s Party, disagrees.

Accused by the left of enabling the far-right’s rise, Weber’s strategy is to neuter it by watering down the Green Deal, clamping down on migration and railing against overregulation, while singling out Giorgia Meloni’s MEPs as acceptable conservative allies on the right.

At the same time, he has ruled out formal cooperation with the three factions to the EPP’s right, while chief whip Jeroen Lenaers has sanctioned internal…