Presidency
The EPP is led by the Presidency, the executive body of the EPP. The Presidency is elected every three years by the EPP Congress. The last election was held during the 2022 Rotterdam Congress.
Functions
- General political guidelines of the Party;
- Presides over the Political Assembly.
Composition
- The President of the EPP;
- The President of the European Commission;
- The President of the European Council;
- The High Representative on Foreign an Security Policy;
- The President of the European Parliament (to the extent that these persons are affiliated to the EPP);
- The Chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament;
- The Honorary President(s);
- Ten Vice-Presidents;
- The Treasurer;
- The Secretary General.
Members of the Presidency:
Manfred Weber
Germany
CSU
Manfred Weber (born 14 July 1972) is the President of the EPP since May 31st 2022 and the Chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament since June 2014 (re-elected in May 2019 and in October 2021).
Weber was elected Member of the European Parliament in 2004 in his home region of Bavaria, Germany; and between 2009 and 2014, he was one of the 10 Chairmen of the EPP Group.
Before becoming an MEP, he was a Member of the Bavarian Parliament from 2002 to 2004 and between 2003 and 2007 he served as chairman of the Bavarian Junge Union, the youth organisation of his party.
Thanasis Bakolas
Mariya Gabriel
Bulgaria
GERB
Mariya Gabriel is the current Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. She is also a Vice-President of the European People's Party.
As a Commissioner she is guiding EU policies relating to the Horizon Europe programme, innovations and research, the Erasmus + programme, education and culture. Her vision for this portfolio encompasses Europe as leader in the digitalisation and the fight against climate changes. She was previously the Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society from 2017-2019.
For her productive work as Commissioner, Mariya Gabriel has been honoured with numerous awards. Among them is the award “Women of Influence 2018” in the category “Talent in Politics”, the most prestigious Italian prize “Golden Apple” for highest achievements for women, the Beaumarchais Medal for her contribution in the protection of the interests of European artists.
Since 2012 Mariya Gabriel has been Vice-President of EPP Women. As Commissioner she has been working on the cause of women rights and their better representation in the digital economy and society.
In May 2009 she has been elected as Member of the European Parliament from the list GERB/EPP. She has been re-elected as Member of the European Parliament in 2014 and became head of the Bulgarian delegation of GERB in the EPP Group. From 2014 to 2017 she was Vice-President of the EPP Group in the European Parliament. She was responsible for the EU’s external policy in the Western Balkans and the Mediterranean. Mariya Gabriel has been two times elected Member of the European Parliament of the year: in 2016 in the category “Development” and in 2013 in the category “Gender equality”.
Esther de Lange
Netherlands
CDA
Esther de Lange (born 19 February 1975) is a Vice President of the European People’s Party.
De Lange currently serves as a Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). Since 2014 she has been the Head of the Dutch delegation in the European Parliament and Vice-Chair of the EPP group in the European Parliament in charge of relations with national parliaments.
She is also a member of the Committee on Economic and Monterey Affairs (ECON), and of the Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy (ITRE) and she holds the position as Vice-Chair of the special committee on Financial Crimes, Tax Evasion and Tax Avoidance (TAX3). Besides that, De Lange is a member of the delegations for the EU relations with the United States and Russia.
Between 2007 and 2014 De Lange was a member of several Committees at the European Parliament including the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI) and the Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT).
Johannes Hahn
Austria
ÖVP
Johannes Hahn (born 2nd of December 1957), originally from Austria, is the European Commissioner for Budget and Administration and is also a Vice President of the European People’s Party.
Involved since an early age with the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Hahn was elected in 2004 as leader of the regional branch of the ÖVP of Vienna. In 2007 he was proposed by his party as Minister of Science and Research in the grand coalition government. He occupied that position until his appointment to the European Commission after the 2009 European elections. During the second term of Barroso’s Commission he served as the European Commissioner for Regional Policy.
Siegfried Mureșan
Romania
PNL
Siegfried Mureșan (born 20 September 1981 in Hunedoara, Romania) is a Vice President of the European People's Party, Vice-Chair of the EPP Group and a member of the European Parliament.
In 2004, Mureșan graduated the Bachelor’s Programme in German from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest. He continued his studies with a Master’s degree in Economics and Management at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which he completed in 2006.
In 2006, he was part of the International Scholarship Programme of the German Parliament. Subsequently, from September 2006, he worked for three years as an Adviser to the Chairman of the Committee on European Affairs of the German Parliament, Gunther Krichbaum, and afterwards he worked from September 2009 to February 2011 in the European Parliament.
In 2011, he joined the Headquarters of the European People’s Party (EPP) as Political Adviser for Economic and Social Policy. In January 2014, he was promoted to Senior Political Adviser. In January 2015, he was appointed as Political Spokesman of the EPP.
In May 2014, he was elected Member of the European Parliament for a five-year mandate, where he became Vice-Chair of the Committee on Budgets. He was the European Parliament’s rapporteur for the general budget of the European Union for 2018.
In May 2019 he was re-elected in the European Parliament where he chose to continue as a member of the Committee on Budgets. In June 2019 he was elected as Vice-Chair of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, where he coordinates the position of the EPP Group on issues related to the EU budget, regional policy, agricultural policy and fisheries policy.
In September 2019, Mureșan was elected Chair of the Delegation to the EU-Moldova Parliamentary Association Committee.
Dubravka Šuica
Croatia
HDZ
Dubravka Šuica (born 20 May 1957) is an EPP Vice-President since her election at the EPP Congress in Rotterdam, and the Commissioner for Democracy and Demography and Vice-President of the European Commission. She is a Croatian politician who has been a member of the European Parliament since 2013.
A member of the center-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Šuica served two consecutive terms as mayor of Dubrovnik between 2001 and 2009. She was the first female mayor of Dubrovnik and one of the first females mayors of major Croatian cities in modern Croatia. She had been a member of the Croatian Parliament in three terms from 2001 to 2011. Since 2004, she has been elected five times in a row as Vice-President of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.
She was elected to the European Parliament in 2013 election, and reelected in 2014 and 2019. In October 2012, she was elected Vice-President of the EPP Women's association, and in June 2019 Vice-President of the EPP's EU parliament group.
Petteri Orpo
Finland
KOK
Petteri Orpo (born 3 November 1969) is a Vice President of the European People's Party and the party leader of Kokoomus. He served as Deputy Prime Minister of Finland from June 2017 to June 2019, and was the Economic and Financial Affairs Minister of Finland from June 2016 to June 2019.
He was the Finnish Minister of Interior from 2015 until 2016. From 2014 to 2015 he was the Minister for Agriculture and Forestry in Prime Minister Alexander Stubb's cabinet.
He was elected as party leader of Kokoomus in June 2016.
David McAllister
Germany
CDU
David McAllister is a Vice President of the European People's Party.
McAllister was born in Berlin on 12 January 1971. After his he finished his secondary school in 1989, he served in the German Military for two years. He studied law with a scholarship awarded by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation and has been a lawyer since 1998. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.
His political career began in 1998, when he was elected as a member of the State Parliament of Niedersachsen. From 2003 till 2010 he served as Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Group and from 2010 until 2013 as Prime Minister of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony).
He has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2014. He chairs the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the European Parliament.
Andrzej Halicki
Poland
PO
Andrzej Halicki (born 26 November 1961) is an EPP Vice-President since 1 June 2022, when he was elected at the EPP Rotterdam Congress. He is a Polish politician of the Civic Platform (PO) who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament since the 2019 elections.
On 10 January 2007, Halicki replaced Jacek Wojciechowicz as member of the Sejm. In the 2007 parliamentary elections, he was elected to parliament for the second time, receiving 3,369 votes in the Warsaw constituency. On June 24, 2009, he became chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, replacing Krzysztof Lisek. In October 2009, he became the spokesman of the PO parliamentary group, a position he held for a year. In May 2010, he was elected chairman of the PO in the Mazovia region. In the 2011 elections he successfully ran for re-election in the Warsaw constituency, receiving 40,002 votes.
From September 2014 until November 2015, Halicki briefly served as Minister of Administration and Digitization in the government of Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz. During his time in office, he oversaw efforts led by the country’s telecoms regulator UKE on an auction for mobile broadband frequencies.
In addition to his role in parliament, Halicki was as a member of the Polish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2012 until 2019. During that time, he served as Vice-President of the Assembly from 2012 to 2014, under the leadership of President Jean-Claude Mignon.
Antonio Tajani
Italy
Forza Italia
Antonio Tajani (born 04 August 1953), is a Vice President of the EPP and a Member of the European Parliament from Italy.
In 1994 he was elected for the first time as Member of the European Parliament and in that capacity he was member of the European Convention that drafted the European Constitution project in the early 2000s.
In 2008 he was appointed as European Commissioner for Transport and after the 2009 European elections he was re-appointed for the Industry and Entrepreneurship portfolio, taking over in 2010 and becoming also a Vice President of the Commission until he took his Parliament seat in 2014.
In January 2017 he was elected President of the European Parliament and he completed his mandate on July 3rd, 2019.
Esteban Gonzalez Pons
Spain
PP
Esteban González Pons (Valencia, Spain, 21 August 1964) is EPP Vice-President since 1 june 2022, when he was elected at the EPP Rotterdam Congress. He is a Spanish politician of the People's Party (PP) who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2014.
In early 2014, the PP chose González Pons to be party’s number 2 for the European elections, following Miguel Arias Cañete. As Member of the European Parliament, he has since been serving on the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Constitutional Affairs.
González Pons is also a member of the parliament’s delegations for relations with Israel and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean. In addition to his committee assignments, he is a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on LGBT Rights; the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights; the European Parliament Intergroup on SMEs; and the European Parliament Intergroup on Sports.
When Arias Cañete was nominated as European Commissioner in late 2014, González Pons took over as leader of the Spanish delegation in the EPP Group. In addition, he co-chairs the EPP Justice and Home Affairs Ministers Meeting, alongside Thomas de Maizière (until 2018), Kai Mykkänen (2018–2019) and Pieter De Crem (2019–2020). He also chairs the EPP’s working group on Brexit.
Following the 2019 elections, González Pons was part of a cross-party working group in charge of drafting the European Parliament's four-year work program on the rule of law, borders and migration.
Within the EPP group, González Pons is one of the deputies of chairman Manfred Weber. In 2021, he was appointed to the group's task force for proposing changes to its rules of procedure to allow for “the possibility of the collective termination of membership of a group of Members rather than just individual membership”, alongside Esther de Lange, Othmar Karas, Jan Olbrycht and Paulo Rangel.
Paulo Rangel
Portugal
PSD
Paulo Rangel is the EPP Treasurer and EPP Vice President of the European People's Party. Rangel was born on the 18th of February 1968 in Portugal. He is a graduate in Law of the Catholic University of Porto (1991). He obtained a Masters in Legal and Political Sciences from University of Coimbra in 1994.
Rangel served as Deputy State Secretary to the Minister for Justice from July 2004 to March 2005. He was Chairman of the PSD Parliamentary Group in the Portuguese Parliament in 2008. He is a member of the Directive Board of the Commercial Association of Porto.
Published Books: Repensar o Poder Judicial, Porto (2001); Reserva de Jurisdição; Sentido Dogmático e Sentido Jurisprudencial, Porto (1997); Concertação, Programação e Direito do Ambiente, Coimbra (1994); Guerras Surdas - Crónicas da Tensão Política, Coimbra (2005); O estado do Estado, Lisboa (2009); Uma Democracia sustentável (2010).
He is a Vice-Chairman of the EPP Group and has been an MEP since 2009.
Ursula von der Leyen
Germany
CDU
Ursula von der Leyen (born 8 October 1958) is the President of the European Commission and as such, an ex officio Vice-President of the EPP.
Von der Leyen served in the federal government of Germany from 2005 to 2019 as the longest-serving member of Angela Merkel's cabinet.
She was born and raised in Brussels, where her father Ernst Albrecht was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French, and is of German and British American descent. She moved to Hanover in 1971, when her father entered politics to become Minister President of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. As an economics student at the London School of Economics in the late 1970s, she lived under the name Rose Ladson, the family name of her American great-grandmother from Charleston, South Carolina. After graduating as a physician from the Hanover Medical School in 1987, she specialized in women's health. In 1986 she married fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen of the noble von der Leyen family of silk merchants. As a mother of seven children, she was a housewife during parts of the 1990s and lived for four years in Stanford, California, while her husband was on faculty at Stanford University, returning to Germany in 1996.
In the late 1990s, she became involved in local politics in the Hanover region, and she served as a cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2005. In 2005, she joined the federal cabinet, first as Minister of Family Affairs and Youth from 2005 to 2009, then as Minister of Labour and Social Affairs from 2009 to 2013, and finally as Minister of Defence from 2013 to 2019, the first woman to serve as German defence minister. When she left office she was the only minister to have served continuously in Angela Merkel's cabinet since Merkel became Chancellor. She has been deputy leader of the CDU since 2010.
von der Leyen is the first woman to become President of the European Commission.
Roberta Metsola
Malta
PN
Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas (born 18 January 1979) is a Maltese politician who has been the president of the European Parliament since 18 January 2022. Metsola was first elected as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 2013, representing Malta. She was elected as the first vice president of the European Parliament in November 2020.
Olgierd Geblewicz
Poland
PO
Olgierd Geblewicz (born 15 October 1972 in Goleniów) is the President of the EPP Group in the European Committee of the Regions and the marshal of the West Pomeranian voivodeship (from 2010). In the years 2008–2010 he was a chairman of the West Pomeranian Regional Assembly.
On 2 December 2008 Geblewicz became a chairman of the West Pomeranian Regional Assembly (he obtained 16 of 30 votes).He has replaced Michał Łuczak, who resigned on the prosecution's charge of possession of a small amount of drugs. In the 2010 local elections, he was reelected to the Regional Assembly (obtaining 10 721 votes). On November 29, 2010 he was appointed marshal by 21 voivodship councilors. He began his office on December 7 of the same year. From 2010 to 2011 he was a president of Baltic Sea States Subregional Co-operation (BSSSC). Also in 2010, he became a member of the National Council of the Civic Platform.
In 2011 he became a member of the EU Committee of the Regions. In 2013 he became the president of the Szczecin Civic Platform section. In 2014 he was reelected to the regional council, on December 1 of the same year he was reelected for the office of Marshal of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship for the second time. On 4 March 2016 he became the president of the Association of Voivodships. In 2018, he retained the mandate of a regional councilor for another term, this time he obtained 42 494 votes (23.14%). On November 23, 2018, he was once again appointed the marshal of the voivodeship.
In January 2020, he was elected chairman of the European People's Party faction in the Committee of the Regions. In regional assembly he is a member of Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, Committee on Budget and Local Government Affairs, Committee on Health, Social Affairs and Public Safety, The Temporary Commission for Maritime Economy and Inland Navigation and the Temporary Commission for the Honorary Badge of the West Pomeranian Griffin.
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Manifesto 2012
The EPP Manifesto, also adopted at the 2012 EPP Congress in Bucharest, outlines the basic principles of the Party summary.
The EPP Manifesto, also adopted at the 2012 EPP Congress in Bucharest, outlines the basic principles of the Party summarising who we are, what our values are, what challenges are we facing and what vision we have for the future. The Manifesto was developed in parallel to the EPP Platform document within the EPP Working Group 1 for “European Policy”.
Platform
The EPP Platform is the core programme of our party outlining our main values, explaining the challenges our society is facing and presenting our vision for the future of European Union.
The EPP Platform is the core programme of our party outlining our main values, explaining the challenges our society is facing and presenting our vision for the future of European Union.
The Party Platform was developed in EPP Working Group 1 for “European Policy” chaired by EPP President Wilfried MARTENS ?and EPP Vice President Peter HINTZE. The Working Group consists of delegates of EPP member parties who prepared and worked?on this document for more than two years and received input?from the drafting committee as well as senior and young experts. The document was adopted at the 2012 EPP Congress in Bucharest, thus replacing the Basic Programme of Athens from 1992.
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