Far right cries censorship after exclusion from
EU election debate
European Broadcasting Union says Anders Vistisen
cannot debate because the far right does not endorse the Spitzenkandidat
system.
“We see there is a censorship [by] the European public
broadcasters,” said Anders Vistisen, a Danish far-right MEP, who represented ID
at a debate hosted by POLITICO.
MAY 13,
2024 8:26 PM CET
BY EDDY WAX
BRUSSELS —
The organizer of the scandal-hit Eurovision Song Contest is facing another
controversy after excluding the far right from a debate in the European
Parliament next week due to disagreement over how the EU should nominate the
European Commission president.
The
European Broadcasting Union invited five political factions — the far left,
Greens, socialists, liberals and center-right — to take part in its big debate
on May 23, two weeks before the EU election, when voters will choose 720 MEPs
and kick off negotiations for the most powerful jobs in the bloc’s
institutions.
But neither
the far-right Identity & Democracy faction — on course to be the
third-largest force in the assembly, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls —
nor the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists will be allowed to
take part, due to their refusal to nominate an official candidate to be
president of the Commission, a role currently held by Ursula von der Leyen, who
is seeking a new term.
“We see
there is a censorship [by] the European public broadcasters,” said Anders
Vistisen, a Danish far-right MEP, who represented ID at a debate hosted by
POLITICO and Studio Europa in Maastricht in April.
The
exclusion of ID will embolden the right-wing argument that it is
undemocratically barred from important roles in the Parliament, where a cordon
sanitaire blocks it from chairing committees and leading legislative
negotiations.
And it’s
not just within the Parliament that the far right feel excluded: Last month,
three Brussels politicians attempted to shut down the National Conservatism
Conference, a meeting of Europe’s hard right featuring Nigel Farage and Viktor
Orbán.
The EBU
sent an email — shared with POLITICO by Vistisen — to senior politicians in ID
on May 7 stating that it cannot field someone in the debate because it has not
officially endorsed a lead candidate to be the president of the next
Commission.
Vistisen
himself has certainly acted like a potential Commission president — even if his
chances of making it are nil: He opened his Maastricht debate speech by
outlining his plan to sack 10,000 EU civil servants, starting with von der
Leyen.
But ID has
not formally described him as a Spitzenkandidat, a German word meaning ‘lead
candidate’. The term refers to an informal convention, used by most political
factions in the Parliament since 2014, that gives the legislature more clout in
electing the Commission president.
ID and ECR
reject the Spitzenkandidat process as an overreach by the Parliament which,
according to the EU treaties, has no right to nominate a candidate for
Commission president.
“I think
the whole system of Spitzenkandidat has become a joke,” said Philip Claeys, the
secretary general of the ID group in the Parliament.
ECR did
nominate a Spitzenkandidat, Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, in 2019. But it has not
done so this time.
The lead
candidate plan blew up after the 2019 election, when MEPs narrowly confirmed
von der Leyen in the top Commission job at the expense of the European People’s
Party’s Manfred Weber — the winning Spitzenkandidat — despite having pledged to
support only a lead candidate for the bloc’s most powerful role.
It was
widely interpreted as a sign that the real power to choose the Commission
president still lies with national government leaders gathered in the European
Council — which has made no progress implementing an electoral law reform that
MEPs have clamored for.
No such thing as a Spitzen
There are
no hard-and-fast rules about what constitutes a real lead candidate.
Even von
der Leyen has been denounced by rivals as a “fake” Spitzenkandidat, given that
she is not running as an MEP and is therefore not directly electable. Her main
rival, the Socialists’ lead candidate Nicolas Schmit, is also not running as an
MEP, breaking with the tradition set by his two predecessors, Martin Schulz and
Frans Timmermans.
Other
parties have put forward more than one candidate for the single-person role:
The Greens, for example, have put forward MEPs Bas Eickhout and Terry Reintke.
The
liberals nominated three candidates, all of whom ruled out running for the job
of Commission president at their campaign launch event.
Even
politicians who oppose the far right criticized the EBU’s decision not to allow
them to debate. “I would not exclude them, no,” said Domènec Ruiz Devesa, a
Spanish socialist MEP who is an EU federalist, and who wants the
Spitzenkandidat system to work in tandem with a new EU-wide constituency of
MEPs who can be elected by all voters.
An EBU
spokesperson wrote in an email: “Two parties …[ECR and ID] … have not nominated
lead candidates for the Presidency of the European Commission and are therefore
not eligible to take part in the Debate.”
A senior
Parliament official said this was a matter for the EBU and the political
parties, and said nothing has changed compared with debates held in 2014 and
2019.
Long
week for EBU
The EBU has
had a challenging week. This year’s Eurovision, held in Malmö, Sweden was one
of the most contentious in its history, overshadowed as it was by conflicts in
Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Ahead of
the final, thousands of protesters gathered in Malmö, many waving Palestinian
flags. When Israel’s contestant, Eden Golan, took the stage, she received a
mixture of boos and cheers.
Commission
Vice President Margaritis Schinas also slammed the EBU’s decision to ban EU
flags during Saturday’s final, describing it as a gift to “the enemies of
Europe.”
“It’s
mind-blowing, what the EBU did,” Schinas told POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.
Schinas wrote EBU chiefs on Monday asking for an explanation, according to a
letter seen by POLITICO.
The
commissioner said the EBU’s decision for “the first time” to exclude flags
other than those of participating countries was ill-timed given next month’s
European election, and at a time when thousands of Georgian protesters were
massing in the streets of Tbilisi in support of the democratic values the EU
represents.
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