24/10/2014
Eduardo Inclán is Maître en Histoire by the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail
The dissolution of the Euro-sceptic group in the European Parliament EFDD (Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy), the spokesman of which is Nigel Farage, leader of Britain's UKIP (UK Independence Party) was communicated on Wednesday October 15th. The cause was Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule's exit from the group to join the ECR group (European Conservatives and Reformists). This excluded the EFDD of the benefits of being a distinct political group in Parliament by not complying with the requirement of national diversity, needing representatives of at least seven different countries. Euro-sceptics were relegated to the Non-Attached wagon, where they had to share space and speaking time in plenary sessions with groups like Marine Le Pen's National Front or the Italian Northern League.
However, on Monday October 20 this group achieved the adherence of Polish MEP Robert Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, member of the KNP party (Congress of the New Right), which left the Non-Attached to become the new Vice-President of the EFDD. The group thus managed to meet again the Parliament's requirements for recognition, granting their access to an estimated annual budget of 1.2 million euros and a chair in the internal management of Parliament, something that particularly bothers its current president, the German Martin Schulz.
This vaudeville shows the structural weakness of the forces that oppose the European Union, known as Europhobe or Euro-sceptic. Their main problem is that although they have more than a hundred seats in Strasbourg's Parliament, they are fragmented into three major groups that are unable to agree even on a minimum program, which makes them irrelevant in the daily parliamentary mechanics. The ECR group (primarily formed by the British Conservatives and the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), the EFDD group (with UKIP and the Italian Five Star Movement as references) and the failed group around the French National Front and Italy's Northern League (which eventually were unable to form as a political group as they failed to meet the countries diversity requirement) agree that the EU is an administrative and bureaucratic monster that crushes the diversity of the peoples of Europe, the most damaging symbol of which is the euro, which they want to eliminate.
It doesn't seem likely that the European Left – most of them Communists with contributions like Syriza (Greece), PODEMOS or EH BILDU (Spain) – will turn their nose at proposing together with the Euro-sceptics the rethinking of some aspects of the economic and political structure of the European project emerged from the Lisbon Treaty. Besides, the forces that support the EU have lost too many months in the appointment of their new leaders, giving a bad image of paralysis and poor quality policy, fighting over some jobs which are too important to make them part of parliamentary marketing. But Euro-sceptic proposals are very heterogeneous. Some want to return to a common market without political weight (ECR), others seek a return to a kind of free association EFTA without solidarity mechanisms (EFDD), and others simply want to return to the old nation-states and national currencies and of the 70s of the last century (FN and Liga Nord).
Neither conservatives, nor liberals, nor socialists seem willing to follow these divisive forces in their efforts. That's why the image of an EU dominated by those who say no to everything proposed by the European Commission or the Council is not very objective, as in the day-to-day they are precisely those that are more divided in Parliament.