A worrying trend: top European officials move to the far right for EU elections

The European elections on 9 June could provide a new political balance in European institutions and some senior officials are starting to take positions to aspire to luxury positions. In the last few days, two surprising announcements have been made, like stones in a still pond, one in Germany and the other in France. Both demonstrate this when you scratch the surface of the European institutions Far-right figures with a lot of power are starting to emerge.

Fabrice Leggeri, former commander in chief of the French police and former director general of Frontex (the European border agency, from which he was forced to resign due to harassment, misconduct towards staff, misappropriation of public funds and violation of international conventions for allowing the illegal deportation of asylum seekers), he will be number three in the European election candidacy for Marine Le Pen’s partythe “National Rassemblement”.

Polls say that this candidacy will once again win the European elections in France and so it could accommodate more than 25 deputiesthen number three assured him that he will become a member of the European Parliament starting from July.

Scandals have tormented Leggeri for years, but the European Commission and the French government protected him despite the growing number of MEPs calling for his resignation. The protection ended when a report by the Anti-Fraud Office of the European Institutions made public all suspicions of misconduct and misappropriation of funds.

Lightly fell, but just a year and a half later he appears with Marine Le Pen defending the hoax that European Union authorities and governments have a plan to replace the continent’s population with the black African and Arab population of the Middle East.

His seven-year tenure at the helm of Frontex was plagued by irregularities and during his years the agency participated, as revealed by journalistic investigations and confirmed by military personnel from several countries, including Germany and Finland, in illegal deportations of migrants. Leggeri also attacked the NGOs that rescue shipwrecked people at sea, accusing them of attracting migrants.

Leggeri is an essential piece in the construction of what is called “Fortress Europe”, due to the harsh immigration policies. Now he says he’s running in the European elections.”to counteract migratory flowsthat the European Commission and the Eurocrats (as he was until they kicked him because he was corrupt) do not consider a problem but a project”.

Other names

Leggeri’s announcement was joined last weekend by that of Hans-Georg Maassen, the man who knows all Germany’s secrets. Maassen was head of the German secret service from August 2012 to December 2018. Maaseen was known to have sympathies for the conservatives, who placed him at the head of the secret service, but his conservative sympathies turned out to be very conservative.

This weekend he announced the creation of a new political party, to the right of the CDU and conservatives competing with the far-right AfD. On a ship near Bonn, the former capital of West Germany during the Cold War, Maassen presided over the founding congress of the “Werteunion” (Union of Values).

Like Leggeri, Maassen was also fired from his last senior position.. In 2018, Angela Merkel’s cabinet showed him the exit door when Germany’s still-to-be intelligence director tried to protect a far-right group by claiming that a video of them chasing migrants in the city of Chemnitz could be false. The video was not fake and Maassen knew it, according to German media.

It took more than five years for them to leave the secret services and move into politics with a new party, but during this time they were normal his increasingly extremist statements on issues like immigration or gay rights.

The Werteunion will have to compete with the AfD and CDU conservatives in an increasingly atomized German electoral market following the birth last year of a far-left anti-immigration party, a split from the far-left Die Linke.