The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union, the one in charge of proposing legislation to the Parliament and the Council and of enforcing it, implementing decisions and ensuring the compliance with the EU treaties.
In this particular sense, the Commission is responsible of taking a country before the European Court of Justice if it doesn’t comply with the European treaties and European law.
The Commission is composed by one Commissioner from each country who nonetheless do not represent their country’s government, but act in a neutral way. One of the Commissioners acts as President of the Commission and is assisted by a number of Vice Presidents. The President is Ursula von der Leyen, who belongs to the EPP family.
She succeeded Jean-Claude Juncker, who has been President of the European Commission from 2014 to November 2019, and José Manuel Barroso who has been President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014.
The antecedents of the current European Commission can be traced back to the Commission of the European Economic Community, which first met in 1958. Since then, five Presidents of the Commission can be related to the EPP family. Although the EPP was not founded until 1976, the first President of the Commission Walter HALLSTEIN (CDU), Franco Maria MALFATTI (CD) and François-Xavier ORTOLI (RPR) all belonged to national parties that later joined the EPP.
The EPP holds regular meetings with the Commissioners belonging to the political family (10 out of 27 in the current Commission) and some of them are attached to the activities of the party being EPP Vice Presidents or chairing EPP Ministerial Meetings.
Overview of the Commissioners
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.
Henna Virkkunen
Finland
Kokoomus
Valdis Dombrovskis
Latvia
Vienotiba
Valdis Dombrovskis (born 5 August 1971), originally from Latvia, is the Executive Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for An Economy that Works for People, and Trade.
Dombrovskis has been a Member of the Board of the New Era Party since 2002. He was Minister of Finance of Latvia from 2002 to 2004 and a Member of the Latvian Parliament during its 8th parliamentary term (2002–2004). Then he was Observer at the Council of the European Union.
On 26 February 2009, following the resignation of Ivars Godmanis, President Valdis Zatlers nominated Dombrovskis to succeed Godmanis as Prime Minister.
EPP Group
The Group of the European People’s Party (EPP Group) is the largest in the European Parliament. It brings together centre and centre-right pro-European political forces from the Member States of the EU, coming together to advance the goal of a more competitive and democratic Europe, closer to its citizens, and a social market economy.
EPP Group official website
Committee of the Regions
The European People’s Party has the largest political Group in the Committee of the Regions (CoR). Chaired by Sari Rautio, the EPP Group is the CoR’s driving force in the EU decision making process.
Read more
Manifesto 2024
The EPP Manifesto outlines the basic principles of the Party summary.
The EPP Manifesto 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”.
Download:
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 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.
