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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned Sunday that his Fidesz party will quit the European People’s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament rather than accept a suspension under new rules expected to be approved on Wednesday.
Orbán issued the warning in a letter to Manfred Weber, the German MEP who heads the conservative EPP group, which is the largest faction in the Parliament.
Last week, Weber and other EPP group leaders took a step toward new suspension rules that would allow them to penalize an entire member party, rather than just a single MEP.
Fidesz has been suspended from membership of the EPP party, the umbrella organization of the political family, since March 2019 but it still has 11 MEPs in good standing within the EPP group in the Parliament, despite moves by some more centrist members to kick them out.
In Sunday’s letter, Orbán said Fidesz would not even stick around to find out what the group does with the new rules, but would quit merely upon approval of the new suspension process.
“I want to inform you, Mr. Chairman, that if the provisions accepted at the meeting of the Presidency and of Head of national delegations on February 26 are put to a vote and adopted, Fidesz will leave the Group,” Orbán wrote in the letter.
Katalin Novák, Hungary’s minister of families and a vice president of Fidesz, accused some members of the group of engaging in “unacceptable” in-fighting at a time when “Europe is fighting to save lives” amid the coronavirus pandemic. Novák, posting a copy of Orbán’s letter on Twitter, accused group leaders of changing the rules “to expel us” because they had “no majority” to do so under the current rules.
Othmar Karas, an Austrian member of the EPP and vice president of the Parliament, said the group would not bow to pressure from Orbán. “We will not allow Orbán to blackmail us,” Karas said. “The EPP Group will go ahead with the planned changes to the rules.”
Some members of the EPP group opposed to Fidesz said Orbán’s letter to Weber was less of a threat than a gift, and that they only hoped he would keep his word and withdraw, if the new rules, as expected, are approved by a two-thirds majority at a group meeting next Wednesday.
According to the Parliament’s breakdown of MEP affiliations, the EPP group would remain the biggest faction even without Fidesz’s members. The conservatives currently have 187 members, followed by the social democrats with 145, out of a total of 705 in parliament.
Lili Bayer contributed reporting.
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