With the Austrian and Estonian delegations departing, the right-wing Identity and Democracy is no longer big enough to be a European Parliamentary group in itself.
The national leaders of the Identity and Democracy (ID) group are planning to have their constitutive meeting on Monday, July 8th, right after the second round of the French elections has concluded. Sources suggest their plan is to rebrand under the umbrella of Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s new outfit, the ‘Patriots for Europe.’
As we reported, the new right-wing sovereigntist political alliance between Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, the Czech ANO, and the Austrian FPÖ was launched last Sunday in Vienna. The Hungarian prime minister promised that it would “very quickly” grow into the third largest group in the European Parliament (EP), prompting a flurry of speculation about prospective additional allies.
Any alliance that wishes to register as a parliamentary group in Brussels (to benefit from the numerous advantages it comes with) needs to have at least 23 MEPs representing at least seven countries. The three founding members of the Patriots already had 24 seats between them—26 if you count Portugal’s Chega, the first to join the group earlier this week—so the only criterion left to meet was the required number of national delegations.
The founders’ confidence that they would not only reach the required threshold, but become the third largest group in the Parliament by overtaking Giorgia Meloni’s ECR with its 84 seats, suggests that negotiations with new members were nearing conclusion already. Earlier, disclosures from Matteo Salvini’s Lega party—a founding member of ID—indicated that the plan was to expand and rebrand ID under the Patriots’ banner all along.
Now, sources close to the negotiations confirmed these rumors to Bloomberg, saying that the ID leaders are planning to meet with the Patriots and hold a joint constitutive meeting on Monday, July 8th, right after the French elections have concluded. The initial deadline for parliamentary reshuffles was July 4th, but several delegations as well as the ID group itself requested an extension given the circumstances in France.
At the same time, it also became clear that the merger would be a necessary step for ID to survive. With the Austrian FPÖ and Portugal’s Chega switching to the Patriots, as well as the independent Estonian MEP, Madison Jaak, joining the ECR on Wednesday, ID no longer meets the seven-delegations criterion alone.
The current six ID members (in decreasing order based on their number of MEPs) are Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally (RN), the Italian Lega, the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), the Flemish Vlaams Belang, the Czech SPD, and the Danish People’s Party.
Together, these six parties now hold 49 seats, with 30 of those belonging to RN alone. Together with the four Patriots, that number would only grow to 75, however, ten fewer than what’s needed to overtake the ECR and become the third-largest group in Brussels.
The Polish Law and Justice (PiS) with its 21 MEPs was also considering jumping ship due to minor ideological differences but then decided on Wednesday to remain in ECR in exchange for influential positions in the group.
The German AfD could have also solved the problem by adding its 15 seats to the Patriots. However, “that is not an option for the AfD at the moment,” the party’s co-president Alice Weidel said on Tuesday evening, citing technical misalignment with the founding members of the Patriots, all three of whom are either in government or looking to form one in the near future.
“If the prospective head of government in Austria decides to go with the head of government in Hungary, it is an alliance of government parties,” Weidel said. As a result, they are subject to “political as well as foreign policy and foreign trade constraints, which we currently have to take into account.”
As our sources have also suggested before, large German companies (often tied to mainstream parties such as CDU and SPD) are among the most important trading partners of many Central European countries, including Hungary, whose government wouldn’t want to compromise its trade relations by teaming up with AfD.
This leaves AfD to go with its back-up plan of trying to create its own group with smaller parties that are deemed too extreme (or nationally incompatible) to join ECR and ID under the name ‘The Sovereignists.’ With a few prospective partners barred from entering due to antisemitism allegations, however, it’s unclear whether they’d succeed in reaching the required threshold.
As for the Patriots, they would still need to find a few new allies by Monday if they want to achieve their goal of becoming the third largest. These might include Slovakia’s ruling Smer with five seats—although it said it wouldn’t join—or the Spanish Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF) with three seats. Nonetheless, we will only know the final composition once the French election is over.
