European People's Party to Vote For Potential 2019 Successor to the Current Commission President

It is an election campaign intended to catapult the winner into one of the EU's top jobs, but 445 million voters could be forgiven for not noticing.

Europe's largest political group, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), will on Thursday choose their candidate to run the European Commission, the powerful executive that drafts and enforces EU law.

The electorate, composed of 700 delegates from Europe's centre-right parties, will be choosing between two male politicians.

The favorite is Manfred Weber, a softly spoken German MEP, who leads the EPP in the European parliament. He once described European values as "inspired by our Christian roots" and has run a campaign stressing his Bavarian village background.

The other candidate is Alexander Stubb, a multilingual, former Finnish prime minister, who attended the London School of Economics. He completes Ironman Triathlons and likes to talk of the "fourth industrial revolution".

The winner will become the favorite to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker if the group wins the largest number of MEPs in the European elections in May.

The parliament's second-largest bloc, the Socialists & Democrats, this week chose the current European commission vice-president, Frans Timmermans, as its lead candidate for the job.

The EPP vote comes amid tension in the group over how to manage Hungary's increasingly authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, its most disruptive national leader. Stubb has argued that Orbán should leave the group if he does not sign up to a European statement of values agreed upon by EPP delegates on Wednesday.

The guidance states that the bloc's money should not be spent in countries "where fundamental EU values and the rule of law are not respected", or...