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13 ANALYSIS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 AUGUST 2024 EP finds rigid cordon sanitaire (5) but also Spain (4). Reflecting recent electoral suc- cess in French legislative elec- tions, Jean-Luc Melenchon's France Insoumise leads the group with nine MEPs, but it is Italy that has delivered more MEPs after the Five Start Movement joined the Sinistra Italiana to add a total of 10 MEPs to the Left's 46. Fascists: Europe of Sovereign Nations ESN 25 seats The Alternative for Germany (AFD) dominates the third far- right alliance in the EP, the Eu- rope of Sovereign Nations group with 25 MEPs. Besides the AfD, the Sover- eignists take MEPs from small parties from Bulgaria, France, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Czechia and Hungary. But it rejected the S.O.S. Romania party's application to join, home of the eccentric far-rightist Diana Șoșoacă, who has been ejected from a recent sitting at the EP by president Roberta Metsola for in- terrupting the session. Also present in the ESN is the now divided French anti-Islamic party Reconquête, led by Marine Le Pen's niece Marion Maréchal and Eric Zemmour. But four of its five MEPs have joined the Eu- ropean Conservatives after their expulsion from the party. As the Patriots, the ESN wants to improve relations with Russia. Committee influence The influential EP committees, where laws are drafted prior prior to being voted on in the plenary, are crucial to national parties to influence policy goals, as well as helping cement the influence of committee chairs as 'chief MEPs' who direct policy direction. Of note once again is how the mainstream parties' cordon san- itaire has kept out the far-right from any positions of responsi- bility. Of the 20 committees, the cen- tre-right EPP chairs seven (for- eign affairs, civil liberties and jus- tice and home affairs, transport, industry and research, fisheries, constitutional affairs, and budg- etary control); the centre-left S&D has five chairs (internation- al trade, economic and monetary affairs, environment and public health, regional development, and women's rights and gender equality). The right-wing European Con- servatives and Reformists, where Italy's far-right Fratelli d'Italia and the Polish PiS hold sway, chair three commitees (budg- ets, agricultural and rural de- velopment, petiions); liberals Renew hold two chairs (devel- opment, and legal affairs) just as the Greens (internal market and consumer protection, and cul- ture and education); while the remaining committee is chaired by a Left MEP (employment and social affairs). With the exception of the ECR, there none of the 20 commit- tees' vice-chairs – there are four for each committee – hails from anywhere on the far-right of the Patriots (PfE) and Sovereignists (ESN). Fragmented far-right True to its often short-term goals, the European far-right has proved itself unable to coalesce amid its divided national inter- ests. Even despite polls pointing to a rightward drift, the inconsist- ent political interests among dif- ferent right-wing forces are too deep to seal any pact for a legis- lative majority, which meant that any conservative victory at the European elections immediately lost momentum, and served to further cement the cordon san- itaire held by the EPP and the S&D, together with Renew, the Greens, and the Left. The ECR, now led by Italy's Giorgia Meloni with her Fratel- li d'Italia, refused to house like-minded parties who had a pro-Russian line, leading to the creation of two new far-right groupings. But the new Patriots far-right group delivering a set- back for the Italian PM's efforts to present herself as Europe's foremost radical-right leader. France's National Rally (RN) en- tered the former Identity group, renamed Patriots for Europe with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz, Austria's far-right Freedom Party, and the populist Czech ANO party led by Andrej Babis. With 84 members, includ- ing eight from Italy's Northern League led by Matteo Salvini, the PfE leapfrogged Meloni's ECR, who in domestic politics is actu- ally allied with Salvini's party. Ad- ditionally, the ECR failed to seal an alliance from Spain''s far-right party Vox, which left the bloc to join Patriots. Among other far-right groups, Germany's Alternative for Ger- many (AfD) did not joint the patriots, but created a group of 28 MEPs called the Sovereign Nations group (ESN), together with small parties from Bulgaria, France, Lithuania, Poland, Slova- kia, Spain, Czechia and Hungary. With its anti-immigration views and scepticism over support for Ukraine, the ESN's priorities dif- fer little from the agenda of Le Pen's National Rally. But the AfD was repudiated by the French party before June's European Par- liament elections over one AfD legislator's failure to condemn Germany's Nazi past strongly enough. Maximilian Krah, the MEP whose refusal to condemn all members of the Nazis' mur- derous wartime SS paramilitary group led to the party being kicked out of the former far-right grouping Identity and Democra- cy, will not be a member in the new grouping.