It may sound like a bad April Fool’s joke, but unfortunately, it’s not.
On Tuesday, April 1st, the European Parliament’s plenary voted to remove the diplomatic immunity of four conservative MEPs at the request of national prosecutors. They include two Polish MEPs from PiS (ECR) who are being persecuted by the Tusk government, a Czech MEP from ANO (Patriots) who was already acquitted twice, and a member of the German AfD (ESN)—whose only crime was tweeting an image depicting former and current German leaders doing what appears to be the Nazi salute.
It only adds to the absurdity that in the post in question, AfD’s Petr Bystron was commenting on the departure of the controversial Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, who lost his job due to remarks about the Holocaust. Specifically, Melnyk said there was “zero evidence” that Ukraine’s Nazi leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the death of 800,000 Jews, and the ensuing scandal forced Kyiv to fire the ambassador from his post.
All Bystron did was post an image of six German leaders, including Chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz with extended arms—mocking Melnyk’s apparent Holocaust relativism—telling the ambassador that “German politicians wave goodbye.”
Now, because of this tweet, German prosecutors—and the European Parliament—accused Bystron of “at least tacit acceptance that this photo montage would leave an objective Twitter user with the impression that the arm position depicted was the ‘Hitler salute,” and charged the AfD politician with distributing “symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations.”
Bystrom’s is not the only example of an MEP being persecuted for a single tweet. As we reported earlier, Polish MEP and ECR Co-Chairman Patryk Jaki is facing three years in prison for the “hate crime” of retweeting a video that depicted real security footage of violent migrant criminals—a case that Elon Musk called “insane.”
The political persecution of the conservative opposition members has become commonplace in Poland since PM Donald Tusk’s liberal government took over in December 2023, and Jaki is only one example.
Along with Bystron, the European Parliament on Tuesday also revoked the immunity of two other Polish MEPs from the conservative PiS (ECR), Maciej Wąsik and Mariusz Kamiński, the two former MPs who were the first to be imprisoned by Tusk over bogus charges, and then pardoned by President Duda. Prosecutors are after them again, this time for violating their five-year ban from politics by attending a few parliamentary sessions following their sentence, and Brussels just gave the green light to throw the MEPs in prison again.
The fourth and final MEP who lost her immunity on Tuesday is Jana Nagyová from the Czech ANO party (PfE), who is accused of tax fraud back home. Nagyová said she was expecting this move from Brussels and is confident that the Prague High Court will rule in her favor for a third time, after being acquitted twice by municipal courts before. ANO is the country’s main opposition—and by far the most popular—party and is expected to come back to government later this year—the fact that prosecutors won’t let this case die is just another sign that the current government knows its time is almost over.
The EU Parliament revoked the immunity of 
, allowing 
to prosecute him for "distributing terrorist symbols." 
ambassador Andrij Melnyk, who was fired for Holocaust relativism in 2022. 
