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STRASBOURG — Europe’s hard right is coalescing.
On Wednesday, French far-right politician Marion Maréchal, the leader of a fringe party, announced that its sole member of the European Parliament, Nicolas Bay, will now sit with the Euroskeptic faction that features Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the Polish nationalist Law and Justice.
The movement of one MEP will make little immediate impact — but it’s a sign of what could be to come in June’s European election. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group — currently a rather small and sidelined power in the Parliament — is threatening to overtake French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew Europe in size, according to recent polls, with Meloni’s MEPs expected to swell in number.
“By joining the ECR we give ourselves the means with this group to outstrip the Renew group of Emmanuel Macron, and thus to reduce the centrist influence in the European Parliament,” said Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen, who leads a different far-right party, National Rally (which sits with the far-right Identity and Democracy — ID — group in the Parliament).
The move is a curious decision for ECR, as Reconquest — founded by firebrand French politician Eric Zemmour and whose name is a reference to the “Reconquista” period in European history when Christian states expelled Muslims from the Iberian peninsula — is considered to be more extreme than the National Rally. Le Pen has been on a years-long crusade to project herself as more moderate and ready to govern.
The addition of Bay could incur some risks for ECR, which has been flirting recently with the idea of accepting Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party MEPs into the group.
Roberts Zīle, the ECR’s sole vice-president of the Parliament, said: “I think personally definitely [having] a French party in the group from the power point of view, it’s an important issue.”
He clarified that the ECR group bureau of senior lawmakers agreed to take in Bay after receiving reassurances about his stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but that any decision about the Reconquest party formally joining the ECR will be taken after the election.
“Our ambitious objective is to move the center of gravity of the European Parliament to put an end to the majority bloc,” said Bay, who railed against “massive immigration,” “Islamization,” woke culture, and LGBT “activism” in his comments to reporters next to the Parliament hemicycle.
ECR is now composed of far-right parties like Spain’s Vox and Finland’s The Finns — who joined from ID last year — but also more moderate conservatives and Euroskeptics such as the Flemish nationalists NVA, and Czech Civic Democratic party.
Valérie Hayer, the liberal leader in Parliament and ally of Macron, wrote on X that the only thing the ECR group has conquered is getting a “definitive ban from political negotiations,” doubling down on their stance that they will not sign a formal cooperation deal with the ECR in Parliament after the election.
Bay claimed his party could return up to 10 MEPs to the EU assembly after the election but that is not entirely borne out by POLITICO’s Poll of Polls which suggests the party will struggle to win more than five or six, as it is currently polling at just 5 percent.
Nonetheless, the move is still a sign that the wind is bulging the sails of the right-wingers in the EU Parliament with four months until the election.
Bay has been in the political wilderness on the European landscape since quitting the National Rally in February 2022, unattached to any grouping and cut adrift from the trappings that group membership brings, including speaking time in the hemicycle or legislative work.
Taking a shot at the National Rally during the press conference, Bay said that it was “infinitely preferable” to have a smaller number of MEPs inside a group like ECR than a larger number in the ID group, which is covered by a cordon sanitiare, which means the more mainstream groupings in Parliament have banned members of the group from leadership roles and from political negotiations.
Maréchal herself broke ties in 2017 with the National Rally and dropped “Le Pen” from her surname. She said her aim is to put pressure on the next president of the Commission by coaxing parts of the European People’s Party — and their French Republican party members— away from their alliance with Socialists and Liberals to create vote-by-vote coalitions together. Other parts of the far-right in Parliament are openly expressing similar ambitions.
The move was perhaps inevitable since Maréchal’s husband, the Italian MEP Vincenzo Sofo, joined the Brothers of Italy delegation which jointly leads the ECR three years ago this month. The couple whispered to each other in Italian on the margins of the press conference, where Maréchal also fluently addressed Italian journalists in their language.
Sarah Paillou contributed reporting from Paris.
