Far right feels squeeze on EU funding

Alliance for Peace and Freedom wants its €600,000. MEPs aren’t convinced.

Harry Cooper

AFP and NPD lawyer Peter Richter, center, celebrates the German Federal Constitutional Court's decision to not ban the NPD in 2015 | Simon Hofmann/Getty Images

The EU’s long tradition of funding its worst critics could be upended if lawmakers cut off the cash to a political group dubbed “the worst right-wing extremists and neofascists” in Europe.

What happens to the Alliance of Peace and Freedom is a test case for the European Union, which handed over €600,000 to the group and its affiliates in 2016 and is slated to do so again this year. Some mainstream MEPs, who describe the group as racist and violent, are deploying a previously unused procedure to halt the funding.

The group denies the charges against it and threatens to take the case to court if the money isn’t forthcoming.

EU cash is regularly handed out to groups that are critical of the bloc, including Euroskeptic parties that want to see it brought to its knees such as Nigel Farage’s UKIP and Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Any grouping of political parties is entitled to EU funds if they represent at least seven member countries, “contribute to forming a European awareness” and respect the principles of “liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.”

Hervé Van Laethem, leader of the far-right Belgian party Nation and a board member of the Alliance of Peace and Freedom, said the group meets those requirements, though possibly not quite in the way they were intended.

The group has threatened legal action against the Parliament, arguing that it is the target of “nothing more than political persecution.”

“Is there an obligation to see Europe like the other parties? We are a lot of European nationalists who want to work together, we have the same idea about Europe,” he told POLITICO at his party’s Brussels headquarters. “Of course we want a kind of European Union.”

In an attempt to tighten the screws on the far right group, the leaders of four political groups in the European Parliament last year launched an investigation into the Alliance over concerns that Parliament cash had been spent on a far-right conference in Stockholm last year which included anti-semitic songs. (The group’s defense was that they were sung as a joke). That investigation is ongoing.

The Alliance is also suffering because of a rule change introduced by the Parliament in December last year after some right-wing groups were repeatedly asked to repay money the Parliament alleged was misspent and were either unable or unwilling to do so.

The rule obliges political groups to provide a guarantee from a triple A-rated bank to ensure they can repay the money if asked. The Alliance has failed to provide such a guarantee, according to a Parliament spokeswoman, and as a result has so far received no money this year.

Other groups affected by the clampdown include UKIP’s Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, Europeans United for Democracy and a new party called Coalition pour la Vie.

‘Persecution’

The Alliance says it meets the EU’s criteria because it has member parties in nine EU countries and has four MEPs — one from Germany’s National Democratic Party and three from Greece’s Golden Dawn.

Supporters of Greek far-right party Golden Dawn in front of the country’s parliament. Golden Dawn is one of the APF’s members | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

The group’s manifesto says it seeks to “protect, celebrate and promote our common Christian values.” That and other language in its statutes proves it is neither racist nor violent, said the group’s lawyer Peter Richter. It has threatened legal action against the Parliament, arguing that it is the target of “nothing more than political persecution.”

To try to sort out the issue, MEPs on the Constitutional Affairs Committee, who will make a recommendation to the entire Parliament on whether to suspend EU funding, summoned senior members of the Alliance — Roberto Fiore of Italy’s New Force and Stefan Jacobsson, who led the now-defunct Party of the Swedes — to Brussels last Thursday to make their case.

The committee hearing was often tense, with Fiore sparring with Socialist MEPs Marita Ulvskog and Ana Gomes, who accused him of holding views incompatible with the EU’s ideals.

Attempting to demonstrate that the Alliance isn’t racist, Fiore cited a visit to Syria in 2016 to meet with members of President Bashar al-Assad’s government as evidence that the group respects Muslims, Arabs and “all the people in the world.”

The hearing was halted after MEPs complained it was turning into a platform for the far-right group, to which Richter, their lawyer, responded by saying it had turned into a “medieval witch trial.”

The Alliance said in a statement released after the hearing that Fiore, Jacobsson and Richter “repudiated every single accusation of the self-proclaimed ‘democrats,’ some of whom fled the hall during the meeting.”

György Schöpflin, a center-right Hungarian member of the parliamentary committee, remembered things differently, describing the Alliance’s performance in front of the committee as “incredibly repetitive, boring and tedious.”

It isn’t clear if MEPs did enough to make the legal case for suspending the Alliance’s funding. “Not all of them were aware of the exact rules,” said Wouter Wolfs, a researcher at the University of Leuven who specializes in the funding of eurosceptic parties. “You wonder whether the hearing really helped the European Parliament in putting up a case against the [Alliance].”

‘See you in court’

Manfred Weber, the German MEP who heads the center-right European People’s Party group, said the funding should be stopped: “The EU should not be naive and hand its opponents the stick to beat it with.” He had earlier described the Alliance as “the worst right-wing extremists and neofascists around Europe.”

A delegation of Alliance for Peace and Freedom during their visit to Damascus in 2015 | Youssef Badawi/EPA

The Alliance’s website includes blog posts by Nick Griffin, a former MEP and ex-leader of the British National Party, whose Twitter profile describes him as a “lifelong white rights fighter.”

Griffin’s subject matter includes the video game Angry Birds containing hidden messages about “unmistakably Islamist” villains and the risks to Swedish milkmaids of being sexually assaulted by Muslim refugees. One of the “tags” displayed at the bottom of the latter page is “white genocide.”

Griffin, Fiore and Jacobsson are the co-authors of the book “Winds of Change,” released in December, which calls for “new generations of political soldiers” and is marketed elsewhere as being “a great introduction to the ideology of revolutionary nationalism.”

In the coming weeks, the Constitutional Affairs Committee will make a recommendation on whether to suspend or approve the EU funding, taking into account the opinion of “a committee of independent eminent persons,” including Parliament President Antonio Tajani.

Richter warned that if MEPs made a decision based on politics rather than the letter of the law, he would take them to the European Court of Justice.

Hungarian MEP Schöpflin wasn’t concerned, saying: “If they want to go to the courts, fine. See you in court.”

A caricature model of Adolf Hitler excreting the right-wing National Democratic Party at a carnival parade in Düsseldorf in 2007. German NDP is one of the APF’s members | Juergen Schwarz/Getty Images

Source: http://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-politicians-to-meps-we-want-eu-money-even-though-we-hate-the-eu-alliance-for-peace-and-freedom-apf/