BERLIN — European People’s Party chief Manfred Weber pilloried left-leaning parties for playing what he framed as partisan games amid a major clash over a greenwashing bill that the conservative leader attacked as “grotesque.”
His comments came after the European Commission’s apparent decision on Friday to scuttle a bill that would force companies to back up environmental claims with verifiable evidence set off a political cluster bomb in Brussels, angering the centrist and left-leaning bloc Commission President Ursula von der Leyen depends on to introduce EU laws. Left-leaning politicians accused von der Leyen, also a member of the conservative EPP, of doing the bidding of far-right groups that oppose the bill.
“The debate is absurd,” Weber told POLITICO of that argument. “As soon as we address factual problems, the left reflexively accuses us of cooperating with the extreme right. The prerequisite for constructive cooperation is realism,” he added, “not party tactics or ideology.”
Weber also lambasted the greenwashing bill — supported by centrist and left-leaning groups— that is at the heart of the political crisis.
“The fact that businesses will in future have to have ecological advertising approved before it is used is grotesque bureaucratic madness, and I will not support it,” he said.
Two days before the Commission said it was killing the bill, known as the Green Claims Directive, the EPP sent a letter to the Commission saying it wanted the law dead. That timing fed a growing sense among the center-left bloc that the EPP — the biggest group in the European Parliament — controls not only the Parliament, but also the Commission.
Weber, however, hit back at the left-leaning bloc, suggesting there’s little chance of an immediate détente. He also took wider aim at leftist parties and particularly Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, criticizing Spain’s effort to opt out of the new 5 percent of gross domestic product NATO spending target.
“One problem with European defense is the Socialist Sánchez, who is questioning solidarity in European security in order to score points with his own coalition with left-wing extremists and separatists,” Weber said.
Weber also said that Europe is running out of time to build an enduring European defense architecture.
“We have a two-year window of opportunity. After that, presidential elections in France and parliamentary elections in Poland will take place,” he said. “The year 2027 will be a defining moment for Europe. By then, Europe must prove its ability to act.”
Rasmus Buchsteiner and Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report.
The post EU conservative Weber attacks European left over greenwashing clash appeared first on Politico.
