Delegates in Vienna replaced “irregular migration” with “illegal migration” throughout their text. I have made edits like that to briefing documents for ten years, and nobody has ever called me far right.
Ten years ago this month I moved to Brussels, for reasons entirely unconnected to the referendum, and I have been waiting ever since for Europe’s adults to produce a serious plan to beat the far right. Here it is. Politico Europe, which is my homepage, reports that Manfred Weber launched a task force called Win2029 two weeks ago to build a platform to beat the far right at the 2029 European election. I read it twice before coffee.
Talks open at a retreat in Sicily in October. I haven’t been invited, although I have been to Sicily, on a package holiday in 2014, which I mention to establish familiarity with the terrain. My own 22-page submission has gone to the task force anyway, in eleven installments, through the contact form on the party’s website. Nobody has acknowledged it, which in Brussels means someone is reading it.
What a Plan to Beat the Far Right Looks Like
My Belgian colleagues have raised an eyebrow at one detail. At the party’s political assembly in Vienna in June, according to confidential minutes reported by Politico, delegates agreed to swap “irregular migration” for “illegal migration” throughout the text, adopting language more commonly heard from the far right. It is also the phrase my father uses at Christmas, usually while carving, usually in my direction. For a moment, reading the minutes, I had the odd sensation of being back in Surrey. It passed.
The difference is the venue. When my father says it over the turkey, it is the sound of a small island that lost its nerve. When Europe’s biggest political family writes it into the minutes in Vienna, with simultaneous interpretation (I assume), it becomes policy, and I find I can live with that. We Europeans understand that a word changes its meaning once enough member states sign it. That is more or less the whole project.
The Firewall Is Holding
The firewall, meanwhile, is intact. The group expelled a Slovenian MEP, Branko Grims, after he appeared at an event organized by the AfD. Appeared. Lawmakers have been told again and again to reject the far-right Patriots’ initiatives while backing similar proposals from Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists, whom the EPP considers acceptable. Similar proposals, different authors, and in Brussels authorship is everything. I would know. My name is on two Fairweather Institute reports.
So EPP lawmakers may not attend far-right events, while far-right lawmakers may attend EPP votes. When talks with the Socialists collapsed over a resolution on migration in Ceuta, internal notes seen by Politico show the plan was to get the Patriots’ votes by deliberately backing one of their amendments, so they would feel part of the process. We Europeans call that consensus. The article runs a photograph at that point, of a camp on a beach in Ceuta where more than 2,000 migrants are estimated to be living. I scrolled past it to reach the amendments.
Center Right, Obviously
The Finnish MEP Sirpa Pietikäinen put the question plainly: “are we center right or are we another right-wing party?” I can answer from Schaerbeek. A right-wing party would never ask. Asking is about the most centrist thing a party can do, and the EPP is asking constantly, in several languages, with a retreat booked.
Dennis Radtke, the German MEP who leads the party’s trade union wing, told Politico that “the asylum seeker numbers are going down; the extreme right is still going up.” He may have a point about the numbers, which I haven’t checked. When the party’s workers’, seniors’ and women’s wings proposed a resolution on social protections in February, delegates objected that its focus on social justice “sends the wrong signal,” and it quietly disappeared from the agenda. As a freelancer on EUR31,000 a year with no pension, I understand that signal. I’ve been sending it to myself since 2016.
Across the Atlantic, as our Capitol Hill desk reported, a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Florida has just moved “Fight Illegal Immigration” from second place on his website to a pledge under his seventh-ranked issue. The Americans are putting the phrase down just as we pick it up. There is your proof that Europe sets its own course: a plan to beat the far right, drafted by Europeans, in words Washington has stopped using.
I’ll be in Surrey for Christmas, as I am every year, under protest. For the first time since 2016, my father and Europe’s biggest political family will be using the same words, and I intend to tell him over the turkey that he has finally become a European. He’ll leave the room. He usually does.
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