Press
A new far-right faction is emerging in the EU Parliament. The FPÖ and Orban’s Fidesz party are apparently planning to work together – AfD participation remains open.
Brussels – Political earthquake in Brussels: A new alliance of the right at the European level could soon plunge the EU Parliament into turmoil. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has announced an alliance with populist parties from Austria and the Czech Republic at the EU level to form a new far-right faction in the European Parliament.
The grouping “Patriots for Europe” between the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz, the Austrian FPÖ and the Czech ANO should soon gain more members and become the “largest faction of right-wing forces in Europe,” said the Fidesz leader on Sunday (30 June) in Vienna.
New “alliance” of the right in Europe: Orban and Kickl with ambitions at EU level
“The sky is our limit,” said Orban, whose country will take over the rotating EU Council Presidency on Monday until the end of the year. To form a group, members from at least four other EU countries would be needed. The new cooperation raises the question of how the recently excluded from the right-wing European ID group AfD now behaves towards this merger.
“This alliance is intended to be a launch vehicle,” said Herbert Kickl, the head of the right-wing Austrian FPÖ. The Czech head of the liberal-populist ANO, former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, explained that the new group in the European Parliament would focus primarily on defending national sovereignty against the EU, fighting illegal migration and reversing the climate-Measures of the “Green Deal”.
The right-wing opposition party FPÖ, the opposition liberal-populist ANO and the right-wing populist Fidesz received the most votes in the EU elections in their respective countries. Fidesz has eleven representatives in the new European Parliament, ANO seven and the FPÖ six. In total they have 24 of the 705 representatives in the EU body.
AfD is thrown out of the ID faction – scandals surrounding Krah and Bystron before European elections
While the Fidesz party has not belonged to any group in the EU Parliament since leaving the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), the FPÖ has been part of the right-wing ID group, together with the Rassemblement National (RN) and the excluded AfD. Babis recently announced his party’s withdrawal from the liberal European group Renew Europe.
After the AfD was involved in numerous scandals shortly before the European elections, the party was thrown out of the ID group in the European Parliament and has been without a group in the parliament since then. The main trigger for the expulsion was the scandals surrounding AfD’s top European candidate Maximilian Krah and Bundestag member Petr Bystron.
Krah hit the headlines when he was in the Italian The Republic said he did not consider all members of the National Socialist SS to be criminals. One of his employees in the European Parliament had previously been accused of spying for China and has been in custody since then. It is still unclear whether the AfD will find a place in the new far-right faction. (sischr/dpa)
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