The EU’s liberal forces under Renew Europe launched their election campaign on Wednesday night (20 March) with the unveiling of their Franco-German trio of top candidates — and a message of unity against populism.
“Let us renew Europe now, together. I’m looking forward to an optimistic, pro-European election campaign,” German MP Marie-Agnes Strack Zimmermann, candidate of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) told the audience.
Strack Zimmermann chairs the Bundestag’s defence committee and is one of the unconventional choice of three ‘Spitzenkandidaten’, along with the current president of Renew Europe in the Parliament, Valérie Hayer, and MEP Sandro Gozi, secretary-general of the European Democratic Party (EDP).
Although, they say, they’re not after the ‘top jobs’.
“We are not campaigning for top jobs, we are campaigning for European people,” Hayer told reporters in Brussels. “Ursula von der Leyen and Nicolas Schmit are campaigning for themselves,” she added.
EU liberals were already in ‘campaign mode’ on social media after current EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was officially chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) top candidate at its congress in Bucharest earlier this month.
The Socialists & Democrats picked little-known Luxembourg commissioner Nicolas Schmit as their Spitzenkandidat at their party congress in Rome at the start of this month.
