Farce in Madrid – How the illiberal party family failed to be formed again – The Weekly 82

Travelling to Spain’s capital this time, Europe’s far-right, nationalist and illiberal forces gathered for their umpteenth attempt to form – something. Although the number of participants may suggest that a new party family was supposed to be born, the Madrid summit revealed something entirely different: it showed how these leaders, who keep going on and on about order and national confidence in their own homelands, become so clumsy when it comes to forming an actual organization.

The difficulty of trying to coordinate the far-right section of Europe’s political spectrum is clearly demonstrated by the confusion around the declaration adopted by the Madrid meeting: according to the first news, the parties even seemed to have agreed on condemning Moscow’s aggressive actions. ‘Did Le Pen and Orbán really sign something like this?’ you could hear the surprised reactions, but it soon turned out nothing like that happened, of course. Although the Madrid summit condemned Brussels, it did not condemn Moscow. ‘Morawiecki didn’t even condemn Moscow?’ asked many others who primarily viewed the grand far-right project from the aspect of Polish politics. Indeed, the diverse responses clearly show how little these forces have in common other than a few eloquent political slogans or their aversion to democracy and the rule of law.

There is no real surprise here: how could Russia-funded Le Pen cooperate in the international arena with such figures as Orbán, who shakes the hands of post-Soviet dictators, Morawiecki, who has a visceral antipathy towards Russians or the hardly pro-Russia Conservative People’s Party of Estonia?

How could Georgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, who have been engaged in a fierce struggle for positions in Italy, suddenly come to an agreement for the sake of international affairs? How could Spain’s VOX, which strongly opposes regional national autonomy, come to terms with the separatist Vlaams Belang? (Fun fact: the event’s organizers raised the Belgian flag to honour the Flemish nationalists, something they feel no loyalty for at all.) And which of the participants would be ready to acknowledge their friendship with Germany’s AfD, thus openly declaring war on Berlin?

Perhaps the Romanians would offer the easiest challenge for this confounded company: for example, the Romanian participant, who currently strengthens the lines of the National Peasants’ Party, was able to successfully cooperate with the post-Communist Romanian social democrats when it came to his own parliamentary seat.

He’s likely to manage with others, too. On the other hand, what do you make of George Simion, a former football ultra and now Chauvinist and anti-Hungarian AUR party leader, who happily posted his attendance of the event and made a selfie with MEP Jorge Buxadé there? Surprisingly enough, the organizers claimed Simion was never invited, and even if he was, he was never allowed to enter, and even if he may have been allowed to enter, he was promptly thrown out. Either way, he still had the opportunity and the time to post a selfie and a tweet.

We expected better security from the “guardians of European culture”…