European elections: is the party over for the centre-right?

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The political alliance that dominates Europe took shape on a cold March night in 1998, over dinner in a bungalow in western Germany. Around Helmut Kohl’s table were a gaggle of premiers and backroom fixers, the German chancellor’s trusted circle on European affairs. It was to be a fateful night for EU politics, whose heavy hangover Europe’s centre-right is wrestling with before next week’s elections. They gathered at the Kanzlerbungalow in Bonn because Kohl’s continent-spanning ambitions for the European People’s party were floundering. Europe’s centre-right was in the throes of an identity crisis. Through years of personal effort, Kohl had slowly opened up the EPP — a pan-EU alliance launched in 1976 with deep Christian Democrat roots — to other strands of centre-right thinking. But by 1998 the expansion was not keeping pace with electoral reality.
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