On the eve of the EU election, France’s National Rally party sees it as too risky to team up with Alternative for Germany.
Just as Europe’s far right is poised to make big gains in next month’s EU election, a spat between two of its most powerful parties risks spoiling the victory parade before the champagne is even opened.
This week a long-simmering feud between Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France exploded. Le Pen’s party is polling first in France, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron, while the AfD is polling second in Germany. Together they could return about 50 MEPs to the next Parliament, and team up as a nationalist, anti-immigration political force.
But, for now at least, Le Pen wants to keep the Germans at arm’s length. Her lead candidate Jordan Bardella’s campaign director said comments about the Nazis by AfD lead candidate Maximilian Krah went too far by asserting that SS members were not necessarily war criminals.
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As is typical for a Politico story, they bury the fact that this is business as usual way down the article:
In some ways the tensions are nothing new: Europe’s far right is already divided on the EU stage, split between three separate camps in the European Parliament: a hard-right camp of Euroskeptics and nationalists that includes Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law & Justice, the far-right ID group, and then Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s battalion of MEPs, who are unattached and left out in the cold.
Can’t have readers jump off too early, because ad revenue
Wait wait wait, are you saying that ethnonationalists from different ethnicities and nations might not like each other? Impossible!
ethnonationalistschauvinists
Democraties after ww2 really should have had added a paragraph like “Playing the system is grounds to be excluded from current and future elections” becazse that’s what they do: seeking out minorities to stoke hate, only for them to gain power.
The problem is you can never make such a rule without the people playing the system abusing them.
