Manfred Weber’s path to power began with public humiliation.

It was 2019 and the Bavarian Christian Democrat had spent months campaigning as his party’s lead candidate for European Commission president, the most powerful position in Brussels.

He had visited 19 countries, starred in slick ad spots and racked up high-profile endorsements — not just for himself but for an informal agreement in which the presidency would go to the candidate whose party got the most seats in the European Parliament election.

And then he was cast aside.

Even though his conservative European People’s Party (EPP) won the electoral contest, the European leaders charged with nominating the next president made no secret they found Weber wanting.

Led by French President Emmanuel Macron (one of whose close allies described Weber as an “ectoplasm” who had “never been successful”), they discarded not just Weber but all the other candidates who had publicly vied for the post.

Instead, they handed the role to Ursula von der Leyen, then the German defense minister. Adding to the indignity, because his replacement was a member of the EPP, it was up to Weber as the group’s leader in Parliament to secure her majority.

The episode left Weber looking weak and ineffective. “Many wrote him off after that,” said one Parliament insider.

Rather than retreat, however, Weber retrenched. In the five years since his humbling, he has emerged as one of the most influential people in the EU capital — arguably second only to von der Leyen. 

His aim, according to a senior EPP insider, is to leverage Parliament’s power to make the European Union much more beholden to regular voters. The fact that doing so also increases his own power is not by chance.

“He wants to appear as the kingmaker, and [show] that he’s going to drive the majority in the next parliament,” said the EPP insider who like others interviewed for the article asked not to be named to discuss internal party matters.

Still largely unknown outside of Brussels and Bavaria, Weber has leveraged his leadership of the EPP — a pan-European political party that includes Germany’s Christian Democrats, Spain’s People’s Party and Poland’s Civic Coalition — into a position of power. With growing confidence, he has shifted his party to the right, challenging von der Leyen on some of her signature policies even as he publicly backs her for another term.

Weber’s experience five years ago clearly remains at the top of his mind. | Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/Hans Lucas/AFP via Belga

As head of the EPP, Weber is well positioned to play a key role after this weekend’s European Parliament election, in which his party is all but guaranteed to garner the largest number of seats. 

With von der Leyen facing unexpected headwinds in her quest for a second term, Weber is now firmly in her camp. It will largely be up to him again to rustle up the support she needs — if he can.

As voters head to the polls, Weber and von der Leyen are facing a backlash from the Socialists and liberals they relied upon last time. They are angry over the EPP’s outreach to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party. While von der Leyen remains the frontrunner, support for her candidacy can no longer be taken for granted, neither among Europe’s national leaders nor in the Parliament.

Weber has thrown his full support behind von der Leyen as the EPP candidate. It’s unlikely to be lost on him, however, that she is at risk of suffering the same fate he did five years earlier — and that it’s his job to prevent that from happening.

Weber’s experience five years ago — to shoot for the EU’s top job and then fall short — clearly remains at the top of his mind. 

While he has publicly moved on from his treatment at the hands of Europe’s leaders, he’s also made it obvious he hasn’t forgotten — or forgiven.

“I think they created damage to the European democracy,” he told reporters in the European Parliament building in Strasbourg in April. 

“But that’s history.”

The Bavarian origins of Manfred Weber

Weber’s 2019 rejection sent him back to his roots, to his wooden house in Bavaria, where the locals he meets at church or at the farmers’ market know him affectionately as “our Mane.” (Pronounced Man-eh).

A Christian Democrat politically and a devout Roman Catholic, Weber’s center of gravity is Wildenberg, a village of fewer than 1,500 people where he went to secondary school and now lives with his wife of 22 years, Andrea, who shuns the public spotlight.

Weber arrived as a fresh-faced member of the European Parliament in 2004. | Jose Manuel Ribeiro/AFP via Getty Images

Despite living and working in Brussels and Strasbourg for 20 years, Weber describes the BMW-manufacturing heartlands of Lower Bavaria as home.

“I’m Bavarian and that’s a bit specific,” he said in a 2019 interview with POLITICO. “I’m closer to Milan than to Berlin.”

An hour’s drive from Munich, Wildenberg has a small river, a butcher’s shop and an uninhabited castle on a hill overlooking hop fields. Weber’s father is also involved in politics for the Christian Social Union, Bavaria’s dominant party.

In addition to attending church every Sunday, Weber organizes a regular Stammtisch, a local meeting for voters to quiz him about the EU, at a sports club in Wildenberg and occasionally in other locations around Bavaria.

“He’s in front, and he’s telling people about what’s going on in the European Parliament,” said Maureen Sperling, a candidate for the European Parliament election for the CSU who sits with Weber on the Kelheim district council. “You can listen to him and discuss with him.”

A passionate Bayern Munich fan, Weber is also known locally as the guitarist and singer in a cover band called Peanuts which plays at Bavarian weddings and festivals. In his youth, he sang in the church choir and played trumpet in the church brass band. He did his military service in an anti-tank crew in Bavaria.

Weber is religious enough he prefers aides to text, not call, on Sundays. The only alcohol he drinks is beer and only that in moderation. He never eats more than necessary, and if he reveals anything about his private life, it is only to refer to the other great pillar of his public identity alongside his party: his faith.

Weber is a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the country’s highest organization of laypeople and chairs the “circle of friends” of a local Benedictine abbey. “For him, his religion, Jesus Christ, is maybe like a battery,” said Martin Neumeyer, a CSU politician who leads Kelheim council.

In March 2022, Weber was granted a private audience with Pope Francis and used the occasion to give him an Easter candle emblazoned with an EU flag. It was “a moment I cherish deeply,” he wrote on Instagram. Weber attended the former Pope Benedict’s funeral later that year.

With his round-framed glasses and mild manners, Weber has been profiled as a “conciliatory conservative” and a calm dealmaker who operates best behind the scenes.

“He’s not the showman, he’s more the craftsman,” says CSU MEP Angelika Niebler, who has known him for 30 years. Weber is “very shy,” according to another colleague in Parliament, and an “extremely reserved” person who values routine and struggles to make personnel decisions. “He doesn’t have an ego,” said a former aide.

After losing out on the Commission presidency, Weber grew a beard. | John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images

Weber — an engineer by training — argues that being dull is a virtue in politics. “Being in the center trying to manage things to bring things together is probably boring sometimes,” he told young EPP activists visiting Brussels last year. “But on the other hand, it’s the essence of everything.”

How Manfred Weber consolidated his power

After losing out on the Commission presidency, Weber grew a beard. It was a new-look Manfred, who had arrived as a fresh-faced member of the European Parliament in 2004 having been the Bavarian parliament’s youngest-ever member and launching startups in environmental engineering and occupational safety after university in Munich. 

Soon after taking office, he found a mentor in the French European lawmaker Joseph Daul and eventually succeeded him as the leader of the EPP’s parliamentary faction in 2014.

Though Weber had been on the party’s right wing, he ran his group as a broad church, offering free votes on divisive topics like abortion. “He was much more conservative when he was a random MEP,” remembers the colleague in Parliament.

With von der Leyen in the Commission, Weber consolidated his hold over the parliamentary group, winning a new term in October 2021. Then, just weeks shy of his 50th birthday in 2022, while the EPP was at a low ebb across Europe, he did something few expected. 

The assumption in Brussels was that Weber would seek to become president of the Parliament, following the death of the Italian Socialist David Sassoli. Instead, he supported the candidacy of a young, fast-rising Maltese conservative, helping install Roberta Metsola.

The president of the Parliament is expected to put aside party loyalty and represent the entire institution on the world stage. Weber set his eyes on another prize. 

In addition to leading the EPP in Parliament, he would seek to become president of the entire pan-European party, whose constituents aren’t MEPs but powerful national political parties from across the Continent.

Performing both jobs would give Weber one foot in Parliament and another among the national leaders who meet regularly in Brussels in the European Council, where much of the power in the city lies. As president of the EPP, he would be in the room with party heavyweights like Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis when they met ahead of European Council summits.

(He would also draw an additional salary of somewhere between €10,000 and 20,000 a month, on top of the roughly €10,000 he earns as an MEP.)

Weber installed Thanasis Bakolas as secretary general of the EPP | Konstantinos Tsakalidis/SOOC/AFP via Getty Images

While some national leaders were wary of giving Weber too much influence, according to an EPP insider, he ignored their objections and ran uncontested. In late May 2022, the party elected him as president at a political meeting in Rotterdam. 

“Now, there are meaningful discussions on coordinating policy at European level but also at national level,” said one of his close allies in Parliament, who said the dual role was Weber’s “single most important achievement.”

As president, Weber quickly moved to reshape the party headquarters in the EU quarter’s Rue du Commerce, sacking two deputy secretary-generals, and replacing the Spanish MEP Antonio “Tono” López Isturíz White as secretary-general with Thanasis Bakolas, a close adviser to Mitsotakis.

One MEP from the EPP group complained that under Weber the party has become dysfunctional, with its working groups not up and running and the decisions taken by Weber and a close circle of advisers instead of with the member parties.

“Our aim is that we arrive in 2024 again as the biggest political party in the European Parliament, that we increase the number of seats, and that nobody in 2024 can govern against the EPP in the European Parliament,” Weber declared in Rotterdam.

Manfred Weber and Ursula von der Leyen: Best frenemies

As president of the EPP party and leader of its representation in Parliament, Weber is, on paper, one of von der Leyen’s closest allies. He’s also emerged as one of the biggest thorns in her side.

Von der Leyen’s appointment as Commission president came on the heels of an unexpectedly strong showing by Green parties in the 2019 European Parliament election. Spooked, Europe’s leaders — including von der Leyen — scrambled to propose a root-and-branch overhaul of the Continent’s economy designed to make the bloc climate-neutral by 2050.

It was this — the Commission’s Green Deal, described by von der Leyen as “Europe’s man on the moon moment” — that Weber set about to challenge.

In the wake of farmers’ protests in the Netherlands and rising unease about migration across the Continent, Weber tacked his party to the right. In early 2023, he challenged von der Leyen directly, insisting on a moratorium on new green laws, attacking her plan to phase out the combustion engine and demanding she spend EU funds on border walls to curb migration.

He quickly won a string of concessions ranging from a quickfire revamp of the EU’s farm subsidies scheme, a consultation with farmers and the withdrawal of a bill to curb the use of chemical pesticides. 

Tensions between the two Germans soared in June 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

“Yes, we are the party of industry, we are the party of rural areas, we are the farmers’ party of Europe, that means to show the voters outside of the Brussels bubble that you can count on this,” he told POLITICO in a video call from Wildenberg.

Tensions between the two Germans soared in June 2023 when Weber moved to kill a nature restoration law, a key plank of the Green Deal. Most of Weber’s MEPs voted it down in Parliament, and EPP governments swung against it, leaving the bill if not dead then a husk.

Weber’s campaign of attrition tested his relationship with the Commission president. A regular dinner of EPP bigwigs later that summer was frosty and tense, one person with knowledge of the meeting attested, saying neither Weber nor von der Leyen budged. 

“He wants to humiliate her,” a senior EPP lawmaker said at the time.

By the time she delivered her State of the Union address in September 2023, it was clear she had got the message: After years of pumping out ambitious new laws, von der Leyen announced the Green Deal would now enter the “next phase,” stressing the Commission would continue to support industry through the transition.

Even as Weber challenged von der Leyen’s policies, he was pressuring her to play by the same rules in her quest for a second term that he had followed the last time around.

For months, it wasn’t clear whether she would stand as the EPP’s lead candidate — or Spitzenkandidat — in the European Parliament election or instead try to once again gather the support of Europe’s leaders in the hope that Parliament would wave her through.

In February, von der Leyen announced that while she wouldn’t formally join the election and seek a seat in Parliament, she would stand for the EPP’s nomination.

Though von der Leyen was the only candidate, Weber organized a vote during the party’s March congress in Bucharest. Billed as proof of the EPP’s democratic credentials, the event put the discontent with von der Leyen on full display.

After France’s Les Républicains refused to back her, nearly a fifth of the party’s delegates who voted rejected her. Hundreds of others didn’t bother to cast a ballot.

The blowback against von der Leyen

At the beginning of the year, a second term for von der Leyen seemed all but locked in. More recently, it no longer looks like a sure thing. 

That’s in no small part due to another initiative of Weber’s — to reach out to parties further to the right from the EPP in the hope of broadening his power base in Parliament and lessening his party’s dependence on left-leaning groups for key votes.

Since von der Leyen agreed to become the EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, Weber has thrown his full weight behind her campaign. | Pool photo by Stephanie LeCocq/AFP via Getty Images

Weber and von der Leyen have spent months wooing Italian Prime Minister Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a pillar of the nationalist and Euroskeptic European Conservatives and Reformists party, to bring her closer to the EPP’s fold.

Weber was one of the first EU politicians to visit Meloni in Italy after her election. Von der Leyen has made several trips to Rome and traveled with Meloni to Tunisia to forge a migration deal with the country.

As a Spitzenkandidat, von der Leyen — who has governed with a tiny circle of advisers and been criticized for her aloofness — has been forced to at least make a pretense of hitting the campaign trail, championing a manifesto spearheaded by Weber that is far tougher on migration that she has been as Commission president.

In recent weeks, however, unease over Weber’s outreach to Meloni exploded into full-blown revolt among the Greens, the liberal Renew group and the Socialists, whose support von der Leyen will need if she’s to secure a second term in the Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters.

“The risk can be if he opens the door to start negotiations with the far right, will be the end of the traditional alliance, between liberals, social democrats and conservatives, the traditional pro European alliance,” said Iratxe García, a Spanish MEP who leads the Parliament’s second largest force, the Socialists & Democrats.

Even some EPP members have privately said they’re uneasy with Weber’s relationship with the Italian nationalist leader. “It’s clear that he aims at the closest possible cooperation,” said a third EPP lawmaker. “He doesn’t have such a big problem with her in terms of values like most of us do have.”

The discontent over the outreach to the right has led to open speculation over whether Europe’s national leaders will seek to replace von der Leyen, and if they don’t, whether she will be able to muster enough support in Parliament. 

In both cases, von der Leyen will need Weber’s support if she’s to survive. 

The next Commission president must be first nominated by the national leaders in the European Council — where Weber has strong ties to many of the major players, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk — and then confirmed in the Parliament, where Weber looks set to keep leading the largest faction.

The nomination is expected to take place in June, the Parliament could then vote to elect the next Commission President as early as July. It might, however, be pushed to September if more time is needed to secure a majority.

Since von der Leyen agreed to become the EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, Weber has thrown his full weight behind her campaign, talking up her merits at every occasion. 

Both politicians have a lot at stake in what happens in the coming weeks and months. A victory for von der Leyen would also be a victory for the EPP as well as the Spitzenkandidat system Weber has championed. “I think success for Weber will be von der Leyen getting another mandate in the Berlaymont,” said Dara Murphy, who was Weber’s campaign manager in 2019. 

But it’s also clear that for von der Leyen, who is 65, failure to secure another term would be a blow that could end her career. For Weber, 51, it would be just another setback — one accompanied by, from his perspective at least, no small amount of poetic justice.

Barbara Moens contributed reporting.