RN de França leaves to sit with German partner in the European Parliament
Jordan Bardella, president of the French far-right National Rally (RN) party and its lead candidate in the European elections, has decided to "no longer sit with" the German AfD in the European Parliament, his campaign director said on Tuesday.
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The top candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Maximilian Krah, recently considered that an SS (paramilitary police of the Nazi state) "is not automatically criminal", in an interview published this weekend in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
"We had frank discussions, the lessons were not learned: we are drawing the consequences", explained Bardella's campaign director, Alexandre Loubet, to the France-Presse agency (AFP), confirming the information provided by the newspaper Libération.
Created in 2013, the populist and anti-immigration German party led the polls until the beginning of the year, with almost 25% of the votes. But since then it has fallen 10 points.
In mid-January, the participation, revealed by the media, of some of its members in a far-right meeting to discuss a plan for the mass expulsion of foreigners or people of foreign origin from Germany shocked the country.
In April, an investigation was opened, on suspicion of Russian and Chinese funding, against Maximilian Krah, and one of his assistants in the European Parliament, suspected of being a Chinese agent, was recently arrested.
Last week, one of the party's figures, Björn Höcke, was fined 13,000 euros for using a Nazi slogan.
The RN's decision completely shuffles the cards of the organization of the European far right, until now divided into two groups, ID (Identity and Democracy) -- of which the RN and the AfD occupy respectively 18 and 10 seats, out of 63 -- and ECR (Reformists and Conservatives).
"If we are expelled, I doubt that they will be able to reach the number of seven countries necessary to form a group", highlighted Maximilian Krah to La Repubblica.
This doubt may be enough to revive the idea of merging these two parliamentary groups, AFP also reported.
On Sunday, Marine Le Pen's participation in a gigantic meeting in Madrid of the Spanish party Vox -- a member of the ECR -- was particularly applauded.
But the 'condescension' of certain ECR members towards Ursula von der Leyen, of which the loyalists of the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of Italy) are particularly accused, is a red line for the RN.
A third idea is mentioned more and more frequently: a new group formed around the future MEPs of Fidesz, the party of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who have not yet been registered.
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