European pro-Vladimir Putin parties unite in a far-right group

The European far right meets in the European Parliament in two large groups, “Europe of Conservatives and Reformists” (ECR) and “Identity and Democracy” (ID). Both are in the polls for the European elections on June 9, fighting for third place with the liberals, behind the traditional right and the social democrats and ahead of the environmentalists.

They are divided into two groups because the ID is supposedly more radical than the ECR, although in practice they tend to vote the same way in the European Parliament. But in recent months the ID has shifted towards a pro-Putin formation, even as the largest party in the group, Marine Le Pen’s French “Rassemblement National” (RN), is trying to erase its Russophilia since the Russian president launched attack on Ukraine.

In ID there are also two formations that They openly maintain good relations with the Kremlin, when they do not repeat their postulates in Brussels. They are the Germans of the AfD and the Austrians of the FPO, a group founded in the 1950s by former high-ranking officers of the Austrian SS, men who had had responsibilities in the Austrian administration, merged with the German one, during Nazism.

Le Pen has long been trying to make people forget that she applauded Putin for years and that it was a Russian public bank that financed her latest election campaigns, on Putin’s orders. When they are called “Vladimir Putin’s troops” in France, the far right wants to clean up that image, but his party’s movements in Brussels go against it. In February you joined his European group “Vazrajdane” (means “resistance”), a far-right Bulgarian party who has never hidden his sympathies for Putin and who defends Russia in the war against Ukraine.

Its leader, Kostadin Kostadinov, is known in Brussels, in addition to being an admirer of Putin, for his openly xenophobic and homophobic speech. A textbook far-right party, bad company when someone, like Marine Le Pen, wants citizens to think that she is not an ultra, but just a typical conservative leader. What the Italian Giorgia Meloni achieved.

Putin’s friends

Kostadinov appeared in Florence in December, during an ultras congress organized by the Italians of Matteo Salvini’s Leaguetogether with Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s ‘dolphin’ and leader of his party for the European elections.

Along with “Vazrajdane”, a small far-right and openly pro-Putin Slovak party, the “Slovak National Party” (SNS, in its Slovak acronym), also joined the ID. Andrei Danko, the leader of this party, Says Putin is ‘a friend of Slovakia’ and, with its position as third party in the government coalition led by Robert Fico, tries to distance it from Brussels and bring it closer to Moscow, for example by refusing to deliver weapons to Ukraine or by vetoing new European sanctions against the entourage of Russian president.

Political groups in the European Parliament normally welcome new members because it helps them grow, but the presence of pro-Russian parties opens a gateway for those who, like Le Pen (or Salvini in Italy) try to conquer the electorate I don’t remember your past sympathies for Putin and that the opposition does not use the issue in the next election campaign. Because the overwhelming majority of Europeans, according to polls, are on Ukraine’s side in this war.

Some of these parties are Putin’s Trojan horse in Brussels. The Austrians of the FPO celebrated the second anniversary of the start of the war without criticizing Putin and saying that the crisis is due to the “warmonger of the European Union”, which is bringing the conflict “to escalation by supplying more and more weapons to the country”. . Ukraine”.

They are parties that abstained or voted against the resolutions approved by the European Parliament in recent years to denounce the political persecution, and ultimately the death or murder, of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.