Populist parties want to form a new group in the EU Parliament. Movements from Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic are on board. That is not enough for a group. What is the AfD doing?
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced an alliance with populist parties from Austria and the Czech Republic at EU level to form a new far-right faction in the European Parliament. The “Patriots for Europe” grouping between the Hungarian governing 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,” the Fidesz leader said on Sunday in Vienna.
“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 of parliament from at least four other EU states would be needed. The new cooperation raises the question of how the AfD, which was recently excluded from the right-wing European ID group, will now behave towards this alliance.
New alliance: fight against illegal migration and climate measures
“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 Babis, explained that the new group in the European Parliament is primarily focused 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.
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.
Source: Stern
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