Cordon who? Weber’s votes leave left in limbo

By Magnus Lund Nielsen and Nick Alipour

Centre-right chief Manfred Weber repeatedly voted with the hard right in the Conference of Presidents (CoP), the Parliament’s executive body, leaving political partners on the left furious. Is there still a cordon sanitaire when it can turn into a jump rope without consequences?
One of the favourite talking points among left-leaning EU lawmakers is the rightward shift of Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP) group.
Leading lefties have long suspected that the omnipotent Bavarian is secretly working toward a rapprochement between the centre-right and far-right pariah groups. Weber's public flirts with Italy’s hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni certainly did not help his case.
The fears are certainly not entirely unfounded. More than once within the past week, Weber supposedly broke the cordon sanitaire – an unwritten agreement among centrist parties to exclude fringe forces on either end of the political spectrum – when meeting with his fellow group leaders at the CoP.
The conference might be largely unknown to the public, but it is undeniably powerful. As the Parliament's executive body, it convenes all its group leaders to decide things such as tabling or removing items from the agenda.
Coming out of the European elections in June, the collective left breathed a sigh of relief as the much-feared alternative majority lapping from centre-right EPP over conservative ECR to far-right PfE did not emerge. The three groups assign 351 members, just short of a parliamentary majority of 361.
However, in the CoP, the reality is different. Here, the group leaders decide and vote based on the weight of their respective camps. Since the group of non-attached members does not count, the EPP, ECR and PfE can easily secure a majority on their own.
This happened when Weber voted with group presidents to his right last week to block lawmakers from the environment committee from grilling the new Agriculture and Fisheries Commissioner.
On Thursday (10 October), he voted to make Meloni‘s ally Raffaele Fitto the first senior commissioner to face the Parliament's hearings – allegedly an advantage. Again, his support came exclusively from hard to far-right groups, parliamentarian sources told Euractiv. The EPP dismissed this as normal procedure, according to Spiegel.
But the spiral of outrage on the left followed instantly.

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[Edited by Rajnish Singh/Martina Monti]