Far right forms new group in European Parliament

Oh the irony of it all! Fascist parties across Europe including the British National Party had vehemently opposed the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union on 1 January 2007.

But the arrival of five Romanian rightwing MEPs and one Bulgarian has given the far right the opportunity that it has sought since July 2004 to form an official group in the European Parliament, which requires at least 19 MEPs from five countries.

A common political charter was signed on 9 January and the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) group made its parliamentary debut on 15 January. The formation of a formal caucus entitles the group to up to €1 million (£660,000) of central funding, though of even greater impetus was the fact that only multinational groups have any real opportunity to set the agenda, table amendments to legislation and get speaking time in debates. The new group will also be entitled to two posts as deputy president of parliamentary commissions, although as Searchlight went to press MEPs from the Socialist Group and others were threatening to vote against any candidates that the ITS nominates.

The programme of this self-styled “union of patriots” includes a tough anti-immigration platform aimed at “reversing the migration flows”, and opposition to further EU enlargement and to a “unitary, bureaucratic, European superstate”.

Its leader is the French MEP Bruno Gollnisch, number two in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. Gollnisch, a professor of law and Japanese at Lyon University, is currently awaiting trial on charges of denying the Holocaust. The group includes six other FN MEPs including Le Pen himself and his daughter Marine Le Pen.

The general secretary of the ITS is Andreas Mölzer, a senior figure in Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria. Mölzer was elected an MEP in June 2004 and briefly expelled from his party during an acrimonious dispute with its leadership. Ironically Austria was one of the states that fiercely opposed the accession of Romania to the EU. Alessandra Mussolini (Lista Mussolini), granddaughter of Il Duce, is one of two Italian MEPs who have also joined ITS.

In the absence of any BNP MEPs, Ashley Mote, the former UK Independence Party MEP (South East) who was booted out of the party after he failed to reveal he was being investigated over allegations of housing benefit fraud, upholds the British end of the affair. In June 2005 the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market waived his parliamentary immunity. Mote currently sits in Brussels as an independent. He was recently forced to deny rumours that he had joined the BNP, stating on his website that he has “no intention” of doing so.

The Bulgarian MEP, Dimitar Stoyanov, belongs to the Ataka party which campaigns for a “mono-ethnic” Bulgaria, viciously assailing the country’s Roma and Turkish population. Stoyanov recently dis-tinguished himself by sending an email to every MEP attacking Livia Jaroka, a Hungarian MEP of Roma origin and the winner of MEP of the year. Stoyanov’s email stated that his own country had the “prettiest Gypsies” and informed anyone who was interested that he knew where you could buy 12-year-old Gypsy brides for “up to €5,000” (£3,300).

Curiously the Sofia Morning News recently reported that Stoyanov, stepson of Volen Siderov, the fervently antisemitic and racist leader of Ataka, has secretly converted to Islam after falling in love. One can only imagine the reaction of his stepfather let alone of the virulently anti-Islam MEPs who comprise the ITS. Not that Stoyanov has suddenly become a convert to the cause of anti-racism. As he told The Daily Telegraph recently, “There are a lot of powerful Jews, with a lot of money, who are paying the media to form the social awareness of the people … They are also playing with economic crises in countries like Bulgaria and getting rich. These are the concrete realities.” These ideas are echoed in the antisemitic ravings published by his stepfather who came a surprising second in the October 2006 presidential election with 21.5% of the vote.

The record of the Partidul România Mare (Greater Romania Party) is little better. Led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the PRM is also antisemitic as well as making frequent outbursts against ethnic Hungarians within Romania’s borders. In a bid to gain electoral respectability in 2004 Tudor issued a letter of “repentance” and even hired an Israeli PR firm, Arad Communications, to run his election campaign, ironically the same firm hired by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. Arad Communications later quit claiming that the PRM was indeed an antisemitic party.

The Latvian far right and the virulently antisemitic and homophobic League of Polish Families have stayed away or perhaps are waiting to see how the ITS develops. The Italian separatist Lega Nord is apparently boycotting the group because of personal differences between its leader Uberto Bossi and Jörg Haider, former leader of the FPÖ.

The idea behind the ITS has been germinating since 2004. A loose ideological confederation designed to give the far right a stronger voice within the European Parliament, the ITS is not necessarily a stable coalition. Mote and Frank Vanhecke, leader of the Vlaams Belang (VB), whose former party Vlaams Blok was banned by a Belgian court for being racist, were quick to distance themselves from Gollnisch’s trial for Holocaust denial but are clearly not horrified enough to desist from involvement with the ITS.

It will be hard to marshal the group to vote for a common agenda. Its east European members are likely to have markedly different national interests from its western MEPs. There is also a sense that the formation of the ITS is a stunt designed to show its members’ respective electorates that they are not an isolated fringe as their domestic records would suggest but part of a wider conglomerate of shared prejudices and hatreds.

We’ve been here before

This is not the first time that the far right in Europe has orchestrated itself into a group. Le Pen led the Group of the European Right from 1984 until 1989 when it imploded acrimoniously following the arrival of members of the German Republicans party who upset the Italian fascist MSI MEPs by questioning the group’s position on the South Tyrol question, long a matter of dispute between German and Austrian fascists and their Italian neighbours.

From 1989 the FN presided over the Technical Group of the European Right, but it ceased when the 1994 European elections left too few far-right MEPs to constitute a group.

The BNP and the ITS

The BNP website heralded the foundation of the ITS, though without MEPs it is not eligible to join. This does not mean it does not want to, despite its opposition to the EU. The BNP is positively chomping at the bit to get elected to the European Parliament in 2009, desperate to get a slice of the action not to mention the funding and other resources available to MEPs.

To this end Nick Griffin, the party leader, has been laying the foundation of future collaboration, cultivating friendly informal links with the leaders of a number of far-right organisations, especially the FN and VB. Griffin had high hopes in the June 2004 European elections that BNP MEPs would soon be sitting alongside their continental counterparts, only to be bitterly disappointed when he was trumped by the UKIP. That defeat certainly explains the libellous vitriol Griffin heaps upon them – he recently accused UKIP MEPs of whiling away the hours with “champagne binges in European brothels”.

As Searchlight reported last month Griffin recently shared a platform with the antisemitic former Klansman David Duke at the far-right Euro-Rus conference in Belgium, before Duke went on to speak at the Iranian Holocaust denial conference in Iran. Afterwards a number of VB participants in the conference took Griffin to a VB post-election victory celebration in a nearby leisure centre. The VB, which now polls around 25% of the Flemish vote, increased its number of local councillors from 439 to 794 in the elections last October. It is a pattern of success that Griffin clearly hopes to emulate.

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