European Parliament
Patriots for Europe is a political oxymoron designed to confuse the public about its true intentions. It stands alongside other political oxymorons such as The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea, which is neither democratic, a republic or run for the benefit of the North Korean people.
Patriots for Europe is a new political grouping in the European Parliament. And the political reality is that none of the national political parties that belong to this group feel the least patriotic leanings towards the European concept.
In fact, they are all Euro-sceptics whose main mission in life is to undermine the concept of a united Europe and drag their countries back to the 19th century when Europe was a patchwork of feuding nationalistic states.
The intellectual driving force behind Patriots for Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. His Fidesz Party was booted out of the centre-right European People’s Party in 2022 for being too right-wing and has been politically homeless ever since.
Soon after the announcement of the results for the recent European Parliament elections – a victory for the far-right – Orban flew to Vienna to launch Patriots for Europe alongside Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and former Austrian Interior Minister Herbert Kickl. Their stated manifesto was: weaken the EU, focus on European cultural identity, introduce stronger anti-immigration measures and oppose the EU’s climate change policy which aims to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050.
The core trio quickly attracted far-right groups from across the EU. By the end of this week it had grown to 84 seats drawn from 12 member states. This places it in third place behind the centre-right European People’s Party (176 seats) and the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (139 seats). There are a total of 720 seats in the European Parliament.
Conspicuous by its absence from the new party is Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Deutschland). Recent Nazi-related scandals have put the far-right Germans beyond the pale even for the likes of Viktor Orban.
A catch was France’s National Rally (RN). It achieved a major victory in the European Parliamentary elections with 30 of France’s 79 MEPs. National Rally then went on to place a disappointing—and surprising—third in French parliamentary elections.
RN’s Jordan Bardella had expected to be French Prime Minister. He has had to settle for the job of President of Patriots for Europe. He secures the job as leader of the national party with the largest number of MEPs in the new political group. He will be using the parliamentary building at Strasbourg as a platform from which to attack France’s left and centre in preparation for the French presidential elections in 2027.
Iran
“I am a reformist principlist”, declares Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s newly-elected president.
But what is a “reformist principlist”? According to Pezeshkian it is someone who is loyal to the principles of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but wants to liberalise/reform the principles of that revolution.
That means, for a start, swearing allegiance to Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khameini, which he did throughout his campaign. In fact, in his victory speech Pezeshkian praised the “guidance” of Khameini which he described as a major factor in his electoral success.
Khameini, for his part, made a rare post-election speech in which he acknowledged that some Iranians dislike his regime. He then added: “We listen to them and we know what they are saying.”
The question is: What is Khameini hearing and what will he allow Pezeshkian to do about it?
The new president campaigned on a pledge to rein in the morality police who had been arresting women who refused to wear head scarves. He also wanted to improve relations with the West and resume talks on Iran’s nuclear development.
The headscarves issue is likely to be a win for the protesters. The government is unlikely to make a song and dance about it, but they will probably inform the morality police to turn a blind eye to the absence of scarves.
An Iranian initiative to resume talks on nuclear development may also be on the cards. This is because, according to US intelligence, the Iranians have recently slowed down their race to develop nuclear weapons. Thus there is more scope for talks on time limits and associated issues.
Wider issues with the West are more problematic. Iran has locked itself into the position of third wheel in an anti-Western alliance with China and Russia. It would be difficult to extricate itself – even if it wanted to.
At a recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, acting president Mohammed Mokhbar delivered a “personal message” from Ayatollah Khameini to Vladimir Putin assuring him that Iran’s relations with Moscow are “deep and unchangeable” and would remain strong regardless of who won the election. He added that the Iranian-Russian axis had changed “the power equations in the world.”
Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis are another major source of friction. At the moment, US-backed Israel is fighting a shadow war with Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. But Iran’s support for Hezbollah provides Tehran with a political and military reach that spreads in an arc all the way across the Middle East and insures its position as regional super power. No Iranian leader is likely to relinquish that power willingly.
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan was briefly in the headlines this month. It deserves more attention.
The reason for its appearance in the spotlight was a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the Kazakh capital of Astana.
The reason that it deserves more attention is manifold. A good starting point is its relations with Russia. It was part of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before that. Russia’s main space facilities are at Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. About 15 percent of the population are ethnic Russians.
Russia controls the main pipelines through which Kazakh oil and travel to world markets. Moscow is heavily invested in Kazakhstan’s important mineral-based industries, especially the increasingly significant uranium deposits. Kazakhstan is the world’s 11th largest producer of oil and gas and is also rich in bauxite, copper, gold, iron ore and coal.
The Kazakh-Russian border is 4,500 miles long, which makes it second only to the US-Canadian border. Trade between the two countries reached $27 billion in 2023. On top of all the above, the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, owes his job to Russian intervention in 2022.
But the icing on the cake is that Russia’s ally “without limits” – China – is the second biggest investor in the world’s largest landlocked country and their annual trade last year topped Russia’s at $37 billion.
Besides all these links between Kazakhstan and its two giant neighbours, President Tokayev is trying to improve relations with the West. He has remained neutral on the issue of Ukraine and maintained oil production at record high levels to try and keep down world energy prices.
Tokayev’s scorecard, however, is a bit iffy on the issue of preventing the export of military equipment to Russia. Kazakhstan regularly allows dual-use equipment to make its way to the Russian forces in Ukraine. For its part, Western governments are prepared to turn a blind eye to Kazakhstan’s sanctions busting. They know that Tokayev is walking a diplomatic tightrope, and that a slip in their direction could result in Russian intervention which the West could little if anything about.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”
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19 Comments
The recent European Parliament election was emphatically NOT “a victory for the far-right”. Far-right parties did better than before (in SOME countries, NOT all). But the largest parties remain the EPP and S&D, which together with Renew (the liberal group) continue to control the European Parliament. Far right groups only constitute about 15% of MEPs. Bigging them up is really not helpful. The reality is they remain on the political fringe.
@Alex. Nevertheless it remains a worrying trend. NR in France had 7 seats in early 2022 – now it has over 140. It’s taken a coalition of centre right to Trotskyists to keep them at bay…The EU is in need of fundamental change – if it doesn’t then the rightward drift will continue…
Tom, you say Kazakhstan has a 4,500-mile border with Russia.
Leaders from the 32 Nato member states (half added since 1999), their partner countries and the EU gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of the bloc. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky also attended. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2lkq58q5d1o
Who are Nato’s partner countries? Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea attended. Other Nato’s partner countries are Mongolia with a border with Russia not so far short of Kazakhstan’s (what do Putin and Xi think?) and Pakistan with a 1250km border with India (what does Modi think?).
Outside of its formal partnership structures, NATO cooperates with a range of countries – called Partners across the globe – on an individual basis. NATO’s engagement with these global partners is taking on increasing importance in a complex security environment, where many of the challenges the Alliance faces are global and no longer bound by geography.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_84336.htm#natopartners
I thought NATO was about the North Atlantic.
When NATO was founded in 1949 the world was a completely different place where security was more of a regional affair. By the time the Soviet Empire collapsed and the Cold War came to an end two things happened: NATO was forced to reassess its role in order to remain relevant and political leaders accepted that the world was a more interconnected place then it had been in 1949 and many years thereafter. Hence the elaborate web of alliances we have today. In short, the world and its political make-up evolves. It is always doing so and we have to be able to adapt to it.
@Martin Gray – The far right parties came back, after the election, with fewer MEPs than they had going into it. It’s therefore just wrong to claim that means there is “a worrying trend”.
Equally it is wrong to claim that the result means the EU is in need of some – very vague – “fundamental change” when the four major centre parties supporting the EU as it is achieve a large majority.
@Paul..I was referring to NR having 7 seats in 2022 & over 140 now …
Depends what you actually mean by far right …
A phrase banded about by progressives to mean anybody they seem to disagree with..
For those at the bottom Western liberal governments have failed to deliver any meaningful change . Globalisation has hollowed out post industrial towns & the EU is no exception – a neo liberal entity dominated by it’s Franco German axis …
@ Paul R,
There can still be a “worrying trend”, even if the difference between two data points might, on their own, indicate a trend in the opposite direction.
It’s easy to fool yourself by picking out the data points you like. This is sometimes known as “cherry picking”.
You might want to include more data points.
If you do this on the particular issue of the rise of the far right in the EU, the picture doesn’t look too good.
” Patriots for Europe is a political oxymoron..”
Why? I don’t see the contradiction.
However, if you’d said “Patriots for the European Union ………….” 🙂
@Peter Martin – Ignoring the data – in this case of actual election results – to advance a claim is “Cherry picking” of the worst sort. If we are to do that, we may as well ignore the result of the general election here and claim there was a surge in votes / seats for the Conservatives. 🙂
@Martin Gray – The NR only operates in France and its gains were offset by losses for other far right parties in the EU. The net results in the European Parliament is fewer seats for the far right.
That said, it should be noted that the NR in France and their counter parts around the EU seem to all have abandoned their traditional hostility to the EU whereas our supposed “mainstream” parties have now embraced it – all of which raises obvious questions about how “mainstream” our mainstream parties now are by European standards.
@Paul….re: NR, You skim over the fact that in early 2022 it had 7 seats now it has over 140…
Only a coalition consisting of the centre right & a bunch of Trotskyists kept them at bay ..
As for the EU – the elections in June some of which were on very poor turnouts – it’s obvious many EU citizens haven’t embraced it nowhere near as much as ‘mainstream parties’ like to think they have ..
What should we do when a likely future US Vice President declares that Britain is now an Islamist country?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/16/trump-running-mate-jd-vance-uk-first-islamist-country-nuclear-weapon
The Lib Dems could make a start by denouncing Vance and Trump for talking dangerous nonsense.
Tom, you say: “I am a reformist principlist”, declares Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s newly-elected president. But what is a “reformist principlist”? According to Pezeshkian it is someone who is loyal to the principles of the 1979 Iranian Revolution but wants to liberalise/reform the principles of that revolution.
The popular view supported the following Guardian article:
‘Recent experience suggests the regime will opt for the safety of an election in which its chosen candidate has no serious rival, even if this leads to a lower turnout and a disillusioned electorate. With so much external and internal pressure on the regime, central to which is the inevitable and looming need to replace the 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime is not likely to leave much to chance. This is a critical moment, Khamenei and his allies will believe, for continuity and security.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/20/president-ebrahim-raisi-death-iran-election-analysis
Surely now is the time for our anti-Iranian views to accept we and the Guardian have been proven wrong by welcoming the new president. The Iranian Revolution was popular in Iran in 1979 when 50,000 Americans were living in Iran and the Shah was not tackling the poverty of the people.
@John Waller
Kazakhstan is part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP), as were both Russia and Belarus until their membership was suspended for obvious reasons. Ireland, Austria and Switzerland are PfP members despite their neutrality, as were Sweden and Finland until they decided to join NATO following Russian aggression in Ukraine. You need to make the distinction between Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, and Partners across the globe to which Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea belong. Turkey, which is a long-standing NATO member is nowhere near the North Atlantic, so NATO was never more than a convenient acronym.
Martin Gray writes “Depends what you actually mean by far right …
A phrase banded about by progressives to mean anybody they seem to disagree with..”
Orwell in his Tribune column of 24/03/1944 grappled with a similar definitional problem -“OF ALL the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’”
https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440324.html
He writes”if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people—certainly no political party or organized body of any kind—which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years…Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or ‘Fascist-minded’. Examples are the Boy Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, M.I.5, the British Legion. Key phrase: ‘The public schools are breeding-grounds of Fascism’. ”
Putin’s United Russia Party denounces Ukraine and Nato as neo-nazis and fascists while demonstrating what most Liberal democracies would recognise as fascist policies in Russia itself.
Orwell concludes his column writing “…it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
Has Germany’s AFD crosed the line from far right to fascism. If so, where does that line stand and what, if anything, can or should be done about it? The same issues remain with today’s culture wars and the same arguments that the British empire and its succesors in the form of American imperialism are as bad as if not worse than the Nazi regime https://bylinetimes.com/2024/07/17/the-daily-telegraphs-disinformation-campaign-about-the-british-empire-laid-bare/
@Martin Gray: you say this, “Only a coalition consisting of the centre right & a bunch of Trotskyists kept – the Rassemblement National – at bay.”
That is incorrect: a coalition of left-wing parties forms the Popular Front, who fought the whole election as a single entity.
The Popular Front and Marcon’s centrists had agreements in many, but not all, constituencies to stand down their highest placed candidate in the second round of voting.
There is great ill-feeling between the centrists and La France Insoumise – the furthest left of the big 4 groupings in the Popular Front.
In Spain, meanwhile, the far right went backwards in the most recent general and regional elections.
Orwell in February 1945 writes in his column “Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer? You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly near future” Tribune
it may well be that war will become permanent. Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another, though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems, both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less constantly whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another, and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals.”
With another cold war developing between democracies and authoritarian regimes, it seems that Orwell could see where we would end up even before WW2 had come to an end.
@Chris…. Coalition – cooperation etc , it’s whatever you like to call it …Thankfully France doesn’t have fptp as it would of been all over in round one …What you can’t deny is NR had 7 seats in early 2022 – now it has over 140 . You might be better off concentrating on why that is and understanding there significant rise in support rather than what constitutes a coalition or not …
Thank you for your persiflage, Martin. As it happens, I’m able to pull off both feats at once: consider the rise of the far right in France AND be accurate. I suggest you give it a try too.
I follow French politics quite closely. I live near the French border and am in France several times a month. I speak French fluently and have daily contact with French friends and acquaintances. Several of these voted for RN.
The reasons they give are:
1. concern over high immigration from countries that do not accept republican values. They link such immigration to crime in quartiers chauds.
2. Cost-of-living crisis, which they blame on the Macron government.
3. General feeling of decline in France’s standing in the world.
These concerns are similar to those of Reform Party voters.
As a party, the LDs should take such Reform Party concerns seriously and present workable policies to reduce immigration. I believe we have started to do that.
As for Rassemblement National, they have incendiary slogans, but no workable answers to the above three issues, and their voters are likely to be disappointed by an RN government.
I regard RN as less threatening to democracy than a new Trump administration, as RN have shown they’re willing to co-operate with other French republican institutions and abide by basic democratic rules.