The leader of the European Union’s main centre-right political group has proclaimed a “civic Europe” as preliminary results suggest a strong showing for conservative candidates in European Parliament elections on Sunday.

In Europe, the “left-liberal” camp had been voted out, said European People’s Party (EPP) leader Manfred Weber in Munich.

“We will implement the issues that are important to us: securing migration, prosperity and the economy and safeguarding peace,” Weber said.

The EPP is a pan-European federation; Weber himself is the lead European candidate for the Christian Social Union (CSU) party in the southern German state of Bavaria. The CSU is the sister party to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the rest of Germany.

He said the CSU is “the party that manages to keep people in the middle.”

“The big message is that we as the CSU, CDU – and probably Europe-wide as the European People’s Party – are the bulwark against right-wing populism and right-wing radicalism in Europe,” he said.