Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are the architects of the new far-right political group. Flickr/Euractiv. Some rights reserved.Although Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders made their usual bombastic statements, they rang more hollow than usual, even for most of the European media, which hardly ever misses an opportunity to proclaim the latest “rise of the far right.” Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front (FN), declared with populist pathos, “We’re here for our peoples, for their freedoms,” while Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), added his usual combative streak, proclaiming, “Today it’s D-Day, we are at the beginning of our liberation.”
The main newsworthy aspect of today’s launch of the far right political group Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF in English, ENL in French) is that this time it seems to be actually happening. In the run-up to the European elections of May 2014 Le Pen and Wilders claimed for months that they had the members, but in the end had to admit that no one had joined their original ‘core group’ of five, i.e. FN, PVV, Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Belgian Flemish Block (VB) from Belgium, and Northern League (LN) from Italy. They announced they would have a group “very soon,” which turned out to be over a year.
As expected, le Pen and Wilders had to build their new group on the services of renegades of parties, rather than the parties themselves. Janice Atkinson was considered too corrupt for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and their Europe for Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group, and will claim her expenses from the ENF in the future, while the two Polish members, Michal Marusik and Stanisław Żółtek, are hailed as “the new moderate political leadership” of the Polish Congress for a New Right (KNP), a leader-centric party that recently ousted its leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke, its only popular politician. Hardly the basis of “a real politically coherent EU-critical group”, as FPÖ General Secretary and European Parliament (EP) faction leader Harald Vilimsky made it out to be.
