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SIGforum's Berlin Correspondent ![]() |
Nothing solid yet, but maybe a pointer towards things to come.
https://www.politico.eu/articl...-elections-2024-nfp/ Meanwhile at the European level, Marine Le Pen went with the Orban camp in the EU Parliament. This makes distribution of the total 720 seats between the groups there as follows: - European People's Party (Christian Democrats, center-right): 188 - Socialists & Democrats (center-left): 136 - Patriots for Europe (far right; this is Orban's crew, with Le Pen's RN the strongest national party after their accession): 84 - European Conservatives and Reformers (right-wing; used to be dominated by the British Tories before Brexit, now Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia are the strongest national party): 78 - Renew (classical liberals and centrists, including Macron's alliance): 77 - Greens/European Free Alliance (progressives and regionalists, left-wing): 53 - The Left (far left): 46 - Europe of Sovereign Nations (really far out there on the right): 25 - Unaffiliated: 32 While the center and left-wing groups have been pretty stable in their organization over the history of the parliament since 1979, those on the right have sorted themselves anew more frequently. The right-wing ECR was formed in 2009 under the lead of the British Conservatives over disagreements on centralism vs. federalism with others in the center-right EPP they were previously members of. The far Right has been organized under various names, latterly Identity and Democracy, with the party of Le Pen and her father before her under its own various names typically the strongest. Orban's Fidesz also used to be part of the EPP, but (were) left in 2021 over their attitude towards the EU, and had since been unaffiliated. Around the recent European elections there were competing attempts at coalition-building, with Commission president Ursula von der Leyen seeking the votes of MEPs ranging from the Greens to Meloni's FdI for her re-election. Meanwhile there were also drives to unite the right-wing camp in a group as big as possible, hindered by factionalism and divergences in radicalism. The German far-right AfD became a major destructive force when they made MEP Maximilian Krah their top candidate despite warnings from within the party; in 2022 already, fellow MEPs wrote a letter to the party leadership complaining about his lack of colleaguality and his blatant pro-Chinese propaganda; the same year, he was temporarily suspended from the then-ID group for endorsing Le Pen's far-right rival Eric Zemmour in the French presidential elections. In 2023, right-wing magazine "The European Conservative" reported on suspicions that a Chinese staffer of Krah was in fact an agent for the PRC. By early 2024, Le Pen was already irritated by hyped reports about a right-wing meeting including members of the AfD near Berlin which allegedly discussed "re-migrating" even immigrants with German citizenship, running counter to her efforts to "de-demonize" her RN, distance it from the open anti-Semitism of her father's days, and make it overall more electable. Then Krah's Chinese staffer was actually arrested on espionage charges, at which point AfD leadership took the unusual step of banning their own top candidate from campaigning for the election. Which he largely ignored, with in-party critics saying he wasn't interested in a good overall result anyway since candidates on lower slots of the AfD's election list were not his guys, and he prefered ruling over a smaller, but loyal conference; and not under Le Pen either, rather than a "hooligan caucus" further to the right dominated by the German members. The last straw was when Krah told an Italian newspaper he'd never generalize that any member of the SS was a criminal. After which Le Pen had the AfD kicked out of the ID group; they finished way below their German poll numbers from the start of the year in the EU elections, too, ending up with just below 16 rather than up to 24 percent in the national results. Afterwards, the AfD conference in the European Parliament in turn kicked out Krah in hope of getting back on Le Pen's good side, but to no avail. At that point Le Pen was mulling whether to go with Orban's new Patriots for Europe, or replacing Meloni's FdI as the strongest party in the "more electable" ECR. Missing victory in the French elections seems to have made her do the former. The AfD eventually ended up forming the separate really-far-right ESN under their leadership, essentially fulfilling Krah's wish - just without Krah, who remains excluded from their conference and is now an unaffiliated MEP. OTOH, Ursula von der Leyen's courtship of a broad coalition seems to have succeeded, since she was re-elected as Commission president yesterday with 401:284 votes, quite a bit better than the 383:327 of her first run in 2019. | |||
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Back, and to the left ![]() |
Looking in on the French system from the outside, it almost looks as if they could use a 'wheel of fortune' and just spin it and go immediately to the political wrangling portion. Two elections? Two spins. Why bother the people with all this? I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. -Ecclesiastes 9:11 | |||
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SIGforum's Berlin Correspondent ![]() |
As you were:
https://www.dw.com/en/anger-af...overnment/a-70055758 Kids today always scream "coup!" if they don't get their will, of course. | |||
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Typical Lefties. Jean-Luc Melenchon has a big mouth but, someone needs to remind him (not like I care for this alliance) that he's a minority partner in this coalition. | |||
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