Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch (Vox/PfE), one of its most trusted members, was excluded from the leadership of the European Parliament (EP) Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (DLAT) during its constitutive meeting last week, despite having already served as a vice chair for the past five years.
What changed? Recently Tertsch joined the Patriots for Europe (PfE)—a group under the mainstream parties’ undemocratic cordon sanitaire. Once again, the Brussels elite has violated its own rules, while defying the will of millions of European voters.
The newly founded national conservative PfE group is the third largest party family in Brussels with 86 MEPs, representing over 18 million voters, yet this didn’t stop von der Leyen’s centrist European People’s Party (EPP) and its leftist allies from imposing a full cordon sanitaire on them after the European elections, excluding them from all top roles in the EP Bureau, all its committees, and now even its interparliamentary delegations.
As we wrote before, the Patriots were denied even a single spot among the European Parliament’s 14 vice-presidents, although even far-left group The Left was given a seat, occupied by an openly communist French MEP.
The Patriots were also stripped of the two chairmanships and eight vice-chairs allocated to them through a D’Hondt matrix, the model used to distribute positions while respecting the proportional representation of each party’s democratic mandate. In other words, the mainstream parties violated several of the Parliament’s procedural rules as well as European Union treaty provisions by sidelining the Right, including the principle of gender parity in absence of enough female replacements.
Yet, when it came to the Euro-Latin American parliamentary assembly, the same parties “cynically” used the gender argument to justify their initial decision to deny Tertsch his “rightfully” expected first vice-chair after serving as third for five years. He was told to be content with second place, since the chair would be a male as well, explained Tertsch’s team to The European Conservative.
Yet it was all just a ploy and the EPP probably never even intended to grant any seat to Tertsch in the first place. It turned out that The Left was already preparing a rival candidacy for second chair. Tertsch took to X, formerly Twitter, to denounce the EPP for “conspiring with socialists, greens, and communists” to thwart him, calling it another compact worthy of being included “in the annals of history.”
In the end, the EPP decided it wasn’t the best optics to have the Portuguese Communist Party’s Joao Oliveira so high up on the team. Especially not after having done the same in the civil liberties (LIBE) committee, where the Spanish chair Javier Zarzalejos (EPP) made a pact with the far-left’s Pernando Barrena, who was arrested in the 1980s for his ties to ETA. So instead, the EPP gave Tertsch’s seat to one of its own MEPs, which is an insult not to VOX, but “to the suffering Ibero-Americans that know [Tertsch] very well and trust him as one of their most vocal champions,” his team said.
Out of the eight members of the DLAT bureau, four belong to the EPP, two to the socialist S&D, while the Greens and the conservative ECR got one each. The Patriots, despite being larger than these two, have no representation.
“The People’s Party [EPP], Socialists [S&D], Communists [The Left] and Greens have turned the European Parliament into an undemocratic and mafia-like mess,” Tertsch said. As he explained:
They [the EPP] have violated the D’Hondt rule, they have scorned the third largest group in the Parliament, they are trying to ignore the political forces that are constantly growing in Europe, and they are siding with the losers co-responsible for the misery, failure, and corruption we see.
Albeit with limited means, the Patriots are fighting back against all this unprecedented injustice. Last week the group announced that it has initiated a lawsuit against the Parliament at the Court of Justice of the EU, aiming to annul the decisions at the committee level that stripped them of all ten of their pre-allocated seats.
The lawsuit points out that the cordon sanitaire violates several articles of the EP’s Rules of Procedure, the Treaty of the EU (TEU), and even the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU that prohibits discrimination on political grounds.
“We will not allow the opinion of millions of patriotic European citizens to be overlooked or disregarded,” the group stated. However, since the Court is increasingly used by the Commission as a political tool, a positive outcome is far from being guaranteed.
