Europe Orban announces new European party alliance

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced an alliance with populist parties from Austria and the Czech Republic at EU level to form a new far-right group in the European Parliament. The "Patriots for Europe" grouping between the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz, the Austrian FPÖ and the Czech ANO should soon gain more members and become the "largest group of right-wing forces in Europe", the Fidesz leader said in Vienna on Sunday.

"Then the sky is our limit," said Orban, whose country takes over the rotating EU Council presidency on Monday until the end of the year. MEPs from at least four other EU states would be needed to form a parliamentary group. The new cooperation raises the question of how the AfD, which was recently expelled from the right-wing European ID group, will now behave towards this alliance. "This alliance is supposed to be a carrier rocket", said Herbert Kickl, leader of the right-wing Austrian FPÖ. The Czech leader of the liberal-populist ANO, ex-prime minister Andrej Babis, explained that the new group in the European Parliament would primarily focus on defending the sovereignty of nation states vis-à-vis the EU, the fight against illegal migration and the reversal of the climate measures of the "Green Deal". The right-wing opposition party FPÖ, the opposition liberal-populist ANO and the right-wing populist Fidesz received the most votes in the EU elections in their respective countries. Fidesz has eleven MEPs in the new European Parliament, ANO seven and the FPÖ six. In total, they therefore have 24 of the 705 representatives in the EU body.

While the Fidesz party did not belong to any group in the EU Parliament following its withdrawal from the conservative European People's Party (EPP), the FPÖ was previously part of the right-wing ID group, together with the Rassemblement National (RN) and the excluded AfD. Babis recently announced his party's withdrawal from the liberal European parliamentary group Renew Europe.