A half-hearted cordon sanitaire. The European Parliament has maintained its veto on part of the far-right forces in the distribution of institutional posts. Patriots for Europe, the group made up of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, Matteo Salvini’s League, Vikctor Orbán’s Fidesz and Vox, among others, will not have any vice-presidencies, despite being the third force. However, the Reformists and Conservatives (ECR) group will have representation because the European People’s Party does not exclude them from the equation.
The 14 vice-presidencies of the European Parliament are allocated according to the d’Hont system, whereby the posts are distributed based on the votes received by each candidate. The three families that form the majority share these institutional posts as well as the presidencies of the committees.
Thus, in a first round of voting, the first 11 vice-presidents of the Popular Party, the Socialists, the Liberals and one from the Greens were elected, including the Spaniards Esteban González Pons (PP) and Javi López (PSC), while the six candidates who were outside the pact were left out, including the candidates of ECR – the Latvian Roberts Zile, who is repeating; and Antonella Sberna, from Fratelli d’Italia – and of The Left (Younous Omarjee), who were elected in the second round, in which each MEP voted for at least two so that it was not a null vote, which led many progressives to vote for the Latvian to stop those from Le Pen’s group.
The cordon sanitaire has thus served to exclude from the vice-presidencies the candidates presented by Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations, the far-right group that has promoted Alternative for Germany.
“We do not want these MEPs to represent the European Parliament,” argued the EPP regarding the pact with socialists and liberals to exclude Patriots for Europe from the vice-presidencies of the European Parliament or the commissions because they are “extreme right-wing forces and friends of Putin.”
It so happens that the EPP imposes a cordon sanitaire on the group that Vox has joined, while Alberto Núñez Feijóo maintains agreements at the municipal level with the party chaired by Santiago Abascal, despite having broken up the regional governments.
Source: www.eldiario.es
