During my brief time in Brussels, I would not seldom go functions hosted by what one might call the city’s Hungarian lobby. Usually a higher calibre of discussion prevails at these things than at comparable events in that godless town — I expect nothing less of the Platonic state (in the Allan Bloom translation) that Viktor Orbán has built on the Danube. But even Plato, that old Fleet Street fox, knew what gave his readers their dopamine hit was not the forms, not the laws of Crete nor the history of Atlantis, but the sexual perversions of Athens’ most eminent citizens — it is Alcibiades, after all, who is given the best speech in the Symposium. At one of these soirées, it fell to an old Rassemblement National hand (dressed, for some unfathomable reason, like Paul Verlaine) to fill us in. He told of his fall from grace at populism’s sun court, where he had been stitched up, accused on a flimsy pretext of antisemitism by Marine Le Pen’s lavender mafia and forced — like General Boulanger — to flee to Brussels in disgrace. Wait, what?
Reader, I was shocked. This was not the Rassemblement of blithe, Leon Bloy-quoting paratroopers that Michel Houellebecq had told me about. My interlocutor was somewhat cagy; he seemed to think Ms. Le Pen no more than a thin-skinned desert despot, and himself the victim of a Stalinist purge; too honest, upright, and committed to the cause to have any place amongst populist yes-men, post-liberal Molotovs and Mikoyans. The Pimlico Journal ’s man also touched on these perverse proclivities, but found himself loath to draw any conclusions other than that greater Openness towards such things and a media prone to steer clear of politicians’ private lives made the emergence of a Tory-style blackmail network in France unlikely. Now I was rather bemused when I read this — it is an unreconstructed defence of my Liberal Democrat-supporting father’s view that less sensationalism from the Murdoch Media would reduce the dark and illicit attraction of these sinister practices and promote a healthier, democratic sexuality based on mutual respect. Well, perhaps. But indulge my speculations otherwise; let us assume that the Rassemblement is compromised by… someone; a Woke assassin who claims his victim by leaving a note with the IHRA working definition of anti-semitism on the corpse. This puts Le Pen’s recent move to eject the AfD from the European Parliament’s Identity & Democracy Group in a different light.
For British readers baffled by this Brussels operetta, the significance of Le Pen’s „betrayal“ is obvious and was spontaneously recognised for what it was by every political commentator with an ounce of sanity left. By conspicuously distancing herself from the AfD on a highly symbolic matter of memory politics, Le Pen offered an olive branch to the German CDU, which dominates the centre-right European People’s Party by its own sheer bulk and its sovereign position vis-a-vis the vast, feudal patchwork of Eastern European corruption & family values parties. In the run up to June’s European Parliament election, Manfred Weber, the EPP’s doddering patriarch, has made a point of refusing to rule out some kind of arrangement with the „European Conservatives & Reformists“ (a Jekyll & Hyde pairing if there ever was one), the Tories’ old Brussels faction. Despite its inroads in European domestic politics (both the Italian and Dutch governments rely on I&D members’ backing, while Le Pen’s successor Jordan Bardella leads the polls for the next French presidential election), I&D remains beyond the pale due to its Immoral Neutrality and its inclusion of cantankerous perma-outsiders like the AfD and the Austrian FPÖ. It is interesting that, while I&D’s other grandees (Salvini and Wilders) quickly rubber stamped Le Pen’s proposal, only the FPÖ has come out against: indication, perhaps, of a post-election realignment to a consolidated and slimmed down parliamentary group consisting of the ECR and I&D’s more kosher members.
The Heimatkurier, house organ of the Austrian Identitarians, put it in precisely these terms:
„Yesterday evening, AUF1 editor Stefan Magnet posted some telling insider information: „I know from my direct contacts in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Budapest that what we are witnessing from the European ‚right-wing‘ parties is a political show. It is not about objections to Krah’s remarks. It’s about politics: Le Pen and Meloni want to establish their own ‚non-radical‘ EU parliamentary group with Orbán. The AfD stands in their way. It’s that simple. That’s why they’re taking the AfD down.“ A thoroughly plausible explanation, if one takes a look at the invitations list of past „right-wing“ conferences at the European level [i.e, the recent National Conservatism conference in Brussels.]: members of various right-wing EU parties participate, but the AfD was always missing. It is futile to speculate whether Le Pen actually wants to found a new group or simply wants to associate herself more closely with the ECR group (to which, besides Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, the Spanish VOX and the Polish PiS belong): the AfD is — or rather was — a disruptive factor.“
The question left unanswered is: why now? The opinion polls show no more than a modest swing to the right; enough to leave a centrist coalition of the EPP, the Social Democrats, and Macron’s shitlib bloc with a handy majority — as well as options to the left, if required. Even the populists’ moderate gains — combined with Russian advances in Ukraine, rising inflation, the spectre of Trump, etc. — could be discursively parlayed into a „crisis“ used to instil a sense of group solidarity and browbeat any stranglers to get a suitable commission president (in which the EPP, as the largest party in both the parliament and council) over the line in the European Parliament. It could be that the EPP’s overtures to the right are simply a way of reminding the centre-left parties that they have other options, and Le Pen’s gambit an overeager misreading of the situation. But something here feels amiss; the (in my opinion highly probable — just look at who is organising these „right-wing conferences“) involvement of Orbán is a particularly telling detail. Orbán has spent years trying to cobble together a unified populist umbrella organisation with its own parliamentary group in Brussels and Strasbourg, mostly to no avail. The major sticking point between the European parties of the right — the war in Ukraine — has hardly gone away. So, indeed, why now?