Like a football manager keen to rebound after a big setback, Manfred Weber is shaking up his team. But some of his players are grumbling about the new game plan — and the manager.

The Bavarian is aiming to bounce back from his failure to become European Commission president last year with a major overhaul of the European People's Party group he leads in the European Parliament.

Weber's project and his own political future will play a significant role in the fortunes of the EPP in the coming years. The EPP group is still the largest in Parliament, but it lost seats and its domination of top EU jobs following last year's European election.

As part of his revamp, Weber has installed a new secretary-general of the group and set up a working group tasked with nothing less than "redefining Christian democracy.”

He portrays his shakeup as vital to the survival of the EPP as the Continent's predominant political force, as the center-right political family grapples with an identity crisis and challengers on multiple flanks.

“Weber has changed, he seems to be acting like someone who’s been persecuted or betrayed, and he surrounded himself with a small team of close people” — EPP insider

“In the last decades, Christian democracy was a stable anchor in the EU,” Weber said. But, he has told party colleagues, the question now is: "Can we stop the decline? Do we go the same way as the Socialists?"

"We are in a historic phase," he told POLITICO in a recent interview in his office at the Parliament building in Strasbourg. "Is Christian democracy at a final end? Or can we renew it?"

But Weber's critics within the EPP see his reform drive as an attempt to strengthen his grip on the group following his humiliating defeat last year, even as he considers other career avenues. The man who campaigned in the European election on "The Power of We" stands accused of being fixated on the Power of Me.

Weber ran in the European Parliament election as the EPP's lead candidate for the top Commission job. But EU leaders rejected him, turning instead to another German EPP politician, Ursula von der Leyen, even though she had not publicly campaigned for the post.

“He is angry, resentful, bitter,” said one EPP insider, who declined to be named. “And now, he is increasingly seen as someone who centralizes power while keeping his options open.”

“There is a bad atmosphere in the group,” said another. “Weber has changed, he seems to be acting like someone who’s been persecuted or betrayed, and he surrounded himself with a small team of close people.”

Weber, for his part, denied he was bitter, trying to grab more power or looking for another job. He said he feels "a lot of support" to continue as EPP group leader.

Maltese move

Weber is hardly facing an open rebellion. No MEP from his group has publicly expressed dissatisfaction with his leadership. But behind the scenes, multiple EPP MEPs and officials voiced discontent.

Much of the criticism centers on Weber's decision to appoint Simon Busuttil, a former leader of Malta's Nationalist Party, as the EPP group's secretary-general — a powerful administrative role. Busuttil, who began his new role on March 1, replaced Martin Kamp, an official from Germany with decades of experience in the Parliament.

Some MEPs and EPP insiders accused Weber of favoring a close ally with little experience of the Parliament or knowledge of the group. "Busuttil is certainly nice but his name fell from heaven for that job," said one MEP.

MEPs have also questioned why a Maltese national — representing a party that has only two EPP MEPs — got the job, when the EPP's largest national delegations come from Germany and Central and Eastern Europe.

“They are scared because they see Busuttil as the president's enforcer while Kamp was a staff protector,” the first EPP insider said.

But Roberta Metsola, one of the two Maltese MEPs from the EPP, offered a different interpretation of Busuttil's appointment, saying it showed that "it is competence and meritocracy that triumphs over geographic realities" in the EPP.

Metsola acknowledged Busuttil's nomination "may have taken some people by surprise." But Weber, she said, "is a bridge-builder" and "under his leadership, the EPP has grown stronger and clearer in articulating what we stand for."

Policy problems

But Weber's critics argue the opposite, saying he has failed to give the group a distinctive political identity.

The challenges of crafting policy acceptable across the broad church of the EPP are considerable. Some national member parties are more centrist and liberal; others feel closer to the nationalist, anti-migration line of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, even if his party is currently suspended from the EPP. Others, such as Germany's Christian Democrats, straddle this divide.

The MEP who spoke to POLITICO complained the party "lacked profile" and "didn't have a clear position" on tackling climate change. "The party didn't react fast enough to the urgency" of the issue, the MEP added.

The second EPP insider said the parliamentary group's biggest problem is that it "does not respond to the reality of its member parties” — meaning it often has different ideas from its national leaders.

Weber, however, argued his shakeup of the EPP is meant to tackle precisely these challenges.

He said he aims to clarify “conflicts inside the EPP,” make his faction “the most advanced digital group in this European Parliament,” and find issues “that ordinary people can identify us with,” such as his call last year for an EU-wide cancer plan.

Weber admitted that failing to become Commission president had been a "difficult period of time” and led to a “moment of reconsidering what you are doing now.”

The DNA of the EPP, he said, is a long-standing culture of managing compromise. But now, he said, “we must be more visible ... more strict and outspoken about what we believe in.”

"The Greens are very good at this," Weber said. "They have identified a few issues — transparency, Green Deal — where immediately people in Europe say, 'Oh that is a Green initiative, that is a Green idea.'"

His own party, he acknowledged, is "not so good" at this at the moment.

Hence Weber's decision to set up a working group on the EPP under the leadership of French MEP François-Xavier Bellamy. He's given Bellamy until May this year to come up with a strategy to reboot Christian democracy. The working group will also tackle a "new social media strategy for the EPP Group," and "preserving EU way of life" in the face of the challenge of China, according to a draft note issued by the EPP.

But what of Weber's own future?

Despite occasional speculation about a move into Bavarian or national German politics, no serious option appears to have emerged so far.

Weber could also become Parliament president. Under the deal that distributed the EU's top jobs last year, an EPP candidate should take over from Italian Socialist David Sassoli for the second half of the Parliament's five-year term.

But EPP officials say that other credible candidates may have better chances of securing a majority, particularly Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness, who could become the first female Parliament president since 2002.

For his part, Weber admitted that failing to become Commission president had been a "difficult period of time” and led to a “moment of reconsidering what you are doing now.”

But, he insisted, he had dusted himself off and was raring to go again now as group leader.

"It was a defeat,” he said. “But it is only a defeat if afterward, you don't stand up. And I stood up. I stand up."