EU-bashing far-Right leaders pledge to join forces

HARD-RIGHT leaders including Viktor Orban, Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen yesterday pledged to join forces and push their Eurosceptic agenda in the European Parliament.

The pact falls short of a fully fledged political alliance but will deepen fears in Brussels that Hungary and Poland’s ruling parties could bolster the far-Right Identity and Democracy (ID) group.

Mr Orban and Mr Morawiecki joined ID members for a summit in Madrid, hosted by Spain’s Vox party, and yesterday agreed a joint statement calling for the creation of a co-ordination office “with the aim of joining forces and voting [together] in the European Parliament”.

ID includes members from Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, Matteo Salvini’s Lega from Italy, the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders-led Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and the Freedom Party of Austria.

If MEPs from Mr Orban’s ruling Fidesz party and Mr Morawiecki’s Law and Justice party joined ID, it would catapult the group to the thirdbiggest alliance in the Brussels and Strasbourg parliament. It is currently the fifth largest.

Members of pan-EU political groups, which must have at least 23 MEPs from seven different member states, qualify for extra speaking time in the parliament and EU funding.

The Madrid statement also criticised “the ineffectiveness of EU diplomacy” in the Ukraine crisis, backed anti-immigration policies and insisted on the primacy of national constitutions over EU law, which threatens the legal basis of the bloc.