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As far-right parties compete to turn European Parliament votes into power, France’s National Rally is in talks with Hungarian Prime Minister Orban to join a new group in the European Parliament.
The RN, which is expected to win the most seats in France’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, is due to decide on Monday whether to join forces with the Patriots Europe group, three people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times.
Prime Minister Orban’s Patriots group gained a seventh member party on Saturday, fulfilling the threshold to form a formal faction under EU parliamentary rules.
If the RN joins forces with its 30 MEPs, the Patriots are likely to overtake the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) to become the third-largest party in parliament.
Spain’s far-right party Vox, which has six MEPs, left the ECR to join the Patriot party on Friday. Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands and Denmark’s People’s Party, which have a combined seven MEPs, also announced they were joining the Patriot party.
The European Communist Party, led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Italian Brothers party, last month pushed President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist ReNew to fourth place, but is now down to 78 members. ReNew has 76 members.
But the surge in right-wing groups appears to mean the dream of a super-merger that would wield great power in the EU parliament is over.
“Anything that promotes Patriot interests in the EU parliament is a good thing for us. Orban is a good politician with the ability to operate at EU level,” one RN source said.
“Please remain vigilant in the coming days,” Orban’s spokesman, Zoltan Kovac, told reporters.
Alice Weidel, leader of Alternative for Germany, who was expelled as an MEP by the RN-led Identity and Democracy group, told the Financial Times last week that she too was looking to form a group, possibly based around ID remnants.
However, given that four parties have left ID to join the Patriots Party, it is unclear whether the AfD will be able to secure MEPs from enough countries.
Russia is a major dividing line between the Patriot Party, the AfD and the ECR: Meloni is a strong defender of Ukraine, while Orbán, Le Pen and Weidel have traditionally held pro-Moscow views.
The Hungarian prime minister met Russian President Putin in Moscow on Friday, shortly after a surprise visit to Kiev on Monday, drawing strong protests from EU leaders who said he was not representing the bloc.
The Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday published a photo of Le Pen celebrating her victory in the first round of voting and posted a message on social media that appeared to be a congratulatory message to the Russian Nationalist Party.
“The French people want a sovereign foreign policy that serves their national interests and freedom from the domination of Washington and Brussels,” the post read.
Le Pen, who has long sought to counter criticism that she is too pro-Russia, hit out at a TF1 news post on Thursday, saying she “does not feel at all responsible for Russia’s provocations against France,” adding that it was “a kind of interference.”
But Orban said earlier this week he was confident the patriot group would grow “faster than anyone thinks right now” after the second round of the French election.
“You’ll see people who have committed to joining and creating a pan-European faction grow into the third, then the second largest. Later on we’ll try to become the largest faction, but it won’t be this year.”
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He has just taken over the six-month rotating presidency, which allows his country’s ministers to set the meeting’s agenda, and will combine the group’s power in parliament with his own.
The centre-right European People’s Party has the largest number of members in the 720-member parliament, with 188, followed by the centre-left Social Democrats with 136. Party size determines how many popular positions, such as committee chair and vice president, a party can occupy.
But MEPs still vote for positions, and the pro-European majority, which includes ReNew, the Greens and other parties, has put up a “cordon” to keep out far-right candidates. They also voted on July 4, before Patriot was formed, to split committee chair positions based on group size.
During the previous term, the ECR had one chairman and one vice-chairman, but these were elected from moderate parties.
“Someone outside the quarantine zone cannot be chairman,” Alex Agius Saliba, a senior Socialist MEP, told the Financial Times.
But Hungary’s European Minister Janos Boka told reporters: “The European Parliament has strengthened institutional and political rights and in an ideal world this would be reflected in the allocation of positions.”
Video: Why the far-right is surging in Europe | FT Films
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