Calls from Europe’s leftist political elite to isolate the ‘Patriots for Europe,’ Brussels’ newest right-wing political family launched by Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, began as soon as the group was formalized earlier this week. The calls are seen as a desperate attempt by the establishment to protect the status quo from the will of the European voters.
The loudest of those demanding a ‘firewall’ against the Patriots—preventing them from accessing key positions in the Parliament despite being the third largest political group—belong to the German ruling coalition, specifically the social democrat SPD and the Greens. This is ironic given that all three coalition members suffered humiliating setbacks in the EU elections, yet are still trying to bar from power those with clear democratic mandates.
“The Orbán faction must be isolated in the European Parliament,” said MEP Katarina Barley, a leader of the German socialists’ EP delegation. She added that the Patriots must be prevented from “sabotaging constructive politics” and denied any senior positions.
The Greens group’s co-president, Terry Reintke, echoed her socialist colleague’s opinion, arguing the Patriots would work against the EU’s green agenda. Reintke may not have noticed, but the Green Deal was the policy line most thoroughly rejected by voters in this election cycle, and is the reason why her group lost the biggest share of seats compared to 2019. Still, her logic dictates that those who would, in fact, represent the voters must be denied the opportunity to do so.
“This adventurous right-wing extremist movement must not be given committee chairs because its only goal is to block Europe, polarize societies, abolish the Green Deal, democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of the press,” Reintke told German media.
The ‘Patriots’ was formally launched as a European Parliamentary group on Monday, July 8th, and comprises most members of the former Identity and Democracy (ID) group as well as a few newcomers, allowing the outfit to become the third largest bloc in Brussels with 84 MEPs—ahead of the liberal Renew, the Greens, and Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservative and Reformists (ECR).
The largest delegations of the Patriots are Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally (RN) with 30 seats, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Fidesz party (11 seats), and Matteo Salvini’s Italian Lega (8 seats). Other major members include the Czech ANO, the Dutch PVV, and the Spanish VOX.
Altogether, Patriots for Europe not only includes many parties that clearly won the election in their respective countries but also three governing parties (Fidesz, PVV, Lega) as well as several who are likely to take control of their home legislatures soon in upcoming national elections, such as the ANO and the FPÖ.
This is why conservatives in the Patriot group expressed outrage at the leftist calls to impose a cordon sanitaire on them, calling it a clearly undemocratic plot designed to disenfranchise tens of millions of European voters.
“For this parliament to act against any political group is deeply anti-democratic and against the will firmly expressed by millions of voters at the June elections,” MEP Enikő Győri of the Hungarian Fidesz said.
Tom Vandendriessche, the leader of the Flemish Vlaams Belang delegation—itself under a heavy cordon sanitaire in Belgium—explained that such a move would not only be undemocratic but even counterproductive to European decision-making by “delegitimizing” the Parliament itself.
“The Parliament belongs to the people that elected its representatives, it does not belong to the majority,” the MEP said. He added that excluding the third-largest group would make the Parliament “lose all sense of credibility when lecturing others about European values and respect for democracy and the rule of law.”
Nevertheless, it seems that the Patriots are too big to be sidelined so easily. According to Politico, the group has already reached a preliminary deal on sharing parliamentary committees, under which the new Right-wing faction would get two chairmanships to lead the Transportation and Tourism (TRAN) committee (formerly chaired by the Greens) and the Culture and Education (CULT) committee, which until now belonged to the centrist EPP.
