Orbán’s offer to the League

In a speech on the radio, the Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán he said he wanted to meet the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki to discuss his idea together: the creation of a new nationalist party in the European Union. The ruling party in Budapest, Fidesz, first left the parliamentary group of the European People’s Party in Strasbourg and two days ago sent a letter to the EPP announcing farewell to the family (note: the letter is not addressed to Donald Tusk, president of the EPP, a further spite in a story of deep friction between him and Orbán). Now the Hungarian Prime Minister is looking for a new home in the EU, he is courted both by the sovereignists, of which the Lega is also part, and by the Eurosceptic conservatives led by Giorgia Meloni. But evidently these families are not comfortable and welcoming enough, so Orbán launched the idea of ​​building a new one. The reactions of the guests were very cautious. Salvini said he had other priorities now, “I’m dealing much more concretely with vaccines and reimbursements to Italian companies, we’ll talk about what will happen in Europe later on”. Even from Warsaw there was caution: although the two countries work together in an anti-Brussels key (they share the idea that the EU is an ATM, no more), they also have many dossiers that distance them a lot, starting with relations with Russia. The new family will have a lot to discuss, but the proposal already provides some elements of analysis. First of all, the fact that the League’s approach to the EPP, advocated by a part of the party (Giorgetti), is greatly complicated: in European politics, the League continues to question its pro-European vocation introduced in Italy with the arrival of the Draghi government. The EPP is marking everything, and having freed itself of the Orbán trouble, it will hardly want to consider the hypothesis of incorporating another, so ambiguous then.