April 18, 2024 - 4:00pm
With European Parliament elections looming this June, the EU’s Right-wing forces are feeling bullish. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, speaking at the nearly-cancelled NatCon conference in Brussels, summed up the Right’s revolutionary aspirations. “The sense of this European election is to change the leadership,” he insisted. “If the leadership proves to be bad, it must be replaced.”
Orbán took the attempted shutdown of NatCon as proof that “freedom in Europe, and especially freedom in Brussels, is in danger.” As the Right’s sense of collective purpose grows in response to this threat, so appears the likelihood of greater collaboration between Eurosceptics in Brussels. Murmurs are growing of a possible merger of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) groups within the EU, both of which are expected to gain significantly more parliament seats in this year’s elections.
Key ECR leader and former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki refused to rule out this possibility while speaking at a press conference with Orbán (whose Fidesz party is now politically homeless in Brussels), as well as a candidate for France’s National Rally, an ID member. Morawiecki said it’s “too early to say” whether a merger between the ECR and ID groups could take place after the elections, but hinted that such a move is up for discussion while confirming that he is talking “intensively” with Orbán about Fidesz joining the ECR.
The impetus for a new Eurosceptic alliance is clear. Existing groups are riddled with contradictions — take, for example, the shared ECR membership of Morawiecki’s strongly populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice party, and the Czech Civic Democrats, whose coalition is routinely pilloried by populist opposition back home for allegedly kowtowing to Brussels. It is virtually impossible to imagine the Czechs sitting comfortably alongside Orbán if he becomes a new ECR member.
Geopolitical shifts of recent years have created similar anomalies among traditional Left-wing forces. Slovakia’s ruling SMER party was last year booted out of the Socialists & Democrats group over its views on issues ranging from Ukraine to the EU’s Green Deal, which correlate far more closely with those of the strongly Eurosceptic, anti-establishment ID group.
A merging of the ECR and ID, incorporating these now-homeless parties from Hungary and Slovakia, would dramatically change the balance of power in Brussels. The resulting Eurosceptic group would, if current election polling proves accurate, rival currently dominant pro-EU centrist groups in size and influence.
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SubscribeI’ll be happy if these new political parties simply reflect the wishes of their electorate. If Hungarians feel different about an issue than Poles, that’s democracy in action. What we have now is nothing like that. We have a disconnected elite that push policies no one wants.
The article is nonsense. Questions such as whether or not to support the Ukraine are particular and of the second order, influenced by any number of extraneous and pragmatic considerations. Since the author makes so much of this issue one can only assume that he has nothing else in the bag. Meanwhile, all European nationalists are united in realising first: that a native people has the right to remain numerically preponderant and culturally predominant in its own homeland; second, that this principle is flouted as far as Europeans are concerned but asserted for everyone else; and finally, that the outlook which sponsors this injustice amounts to an unlimited assault on the future of all European peoples. Whilst this deadly assault gathers pace, the nationalists of Europe can only grow more and more united – and good luck to them, for their opponents are evil, destructive and bigoted, the very image of everything which they affect to condemn.
I’m not sure how the differences between right-wing groups present a cooperation problem that is not also possessed by any other ideologically aligned parties in the EU. They all possess national priorities that are in conflict with other national priorities – that was what the EU was set up to deal with, in an important sense.
The main difference between right-wing national governments in the EU and left-wing national governments in the EU is that the right-wing governments will likely cherish and respect the principle of subsidiarity that the EU itself is supposed to respect. If anything, these parties might have a better chance of making the EU work as it ought to.