CDU and CSU want to draw with Manfred Weber as a common leading candidate in the European elections. The CDU party leadership wants to make a suggestion to the executive committee according to information of the SPIEGEL on a written examination in Potsdam in the middle of January.

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On the one hand, the waiver of one's own CDU candidate is due to the fact that Weber is the European top candidate of the EPP party family, which includes the CDU and CSU. But above all, Weber stands for a fundamental change of course: Away from the EU-critical policy that has hitherto pursued the CSU.

At the European elections in 2014, the CDU had sent yet Lower Saxony's former Prime Minister David McAllister into the race, while in the CSU instead of the official top candidate Markus Ferber especially the EU critic Peter Gauweiler set the tone. However, the Euro-critical course did not pay off for the CSU. It plunged from 48.1 to 40.5 percent.

Weber on the other hand, who is also deputy CSU chief, the CDU is also well mediated because of his conciliatory tone, for example, in the refugee debate. At the CDU party conference in early December in Hamburg, he received after his brief speech standing ovations. Also because he had called to end the nurses dispute in migration policy.

After the federal elections of 1980 and 2002, in which the Union entered into the race with the CSU chairmen Franz Josef Strauß and Edmund Stoiber as chancellor candidates, this is only the third time in German history that the Union has won a supraregional election with a CSU Candidates compete.

For the first time in a European election, a joint election program of the Union parties is also considered - also an indication that the fundamental differences in European policy should be settled.

SPD attacks Weber over Orban

The SPD is already shooting at Weber. The main criticism is that the Hungarian Prime Minister Fidesz party Viktor Orbán is a member of the EPP and therefore supports Weber. The SPD group in the European Parliament consider the events in Hungary with "great concern", it is said in a letter from the head of the SPD MEP in the European Parliament, Jens Geier, to Weber. The letter is available to SPIEGEL.

Geier recalls the resolution of the European Parliament in September to initiate a so-called judicial procedure against Hungary. "The criticism refers to restrictions on the freedom of expression, research and assembly as well as to a weakening of the constitutional and judicial system and of non-governmental organizations," he writes.

He also criticizes "possible violations of the rights of minorities and refugees and corruption" in Hungary. It poses "the urgent question of when the EPP will exclude Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party from its party family," Geier writes.

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