The ESN political group doesn\u2019t face sanctions, and the only effect that AfD MEPs would feel would be the lack of a political party to provide support in future EU elections or to coordinate policy with like-minded factions.<\/p>\n
The ESN party and ESN group were founded by Alternative for Germany in the wake of the 2024 EU election, and include Bulgaria\u2019s Revival, France\u2019s Reconquest (led by \u00c9ric Zemmour), Poland\u2019s Confederation, Czechia\u2019s SPD, Hungary\u2019s Our Homeland Movement, the Netherlands\u2019 Forum for Democracy, and Slovakia\u2019s Republic Movement. In 2026 it is slated to receive over \u20ac2 million in subsidies from the European Parliament.<\/p>\n
The watchdog \u2014\u00a0the Authority for European Political Parties and Foundations \u2014\u00a0said it had found evidence that \u201ccast doubt on the compliance\u201d of the ESN party with EU values, the director of the authority, Pascal Schonard, wrote in a letter. The missive was addressed to the Council of the EU \u2014 comprising representatives of national governments \u2014 and was seen by POLITICO.<\/p>\n
The watchdog monitors whether political parties and foundations comply with the EU rules that govern them. Those rules require parties to uphold the Union\u2019s core values \u2014 including \u201crespect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities\u201d \u2014 as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.<\/p>\n
In his 300-page letter Schonard says there is \u201cevidence\u201d that ESN members are violating EU values. The proof includes court rulings and screenshots and social media posts from MEPs and party lawmakers that display anti-immigration, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric, including calls for remigration and the depiction of homosexuality as pedophilia. One of the social media posts highlighted in the letter came from Tomasz Micha\u0142 Grabarczyk, a national politician for Poland\u2019s far-right Confederation\/New Hope party, who wrote this month<\/a>: \u201cIsrael is not just a criminal state. Israelis are a nation of criminals.\u201d New Hope retweeted the post.<\/p>\n Neither Confederation nor Grabarczyk responded to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ESN political group doesn\u2019t face sanctions, and the only effect that AfD MEPs would feel would be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26269,26270,613,1803,500,6759,19117,1607,26271,26272,26273,60,5,378,2232,5420,8274,9056,8101,621,671,1383,692,26274,1831,2892,6377,2296,2240],"class_list":["post-25062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-breaches","tag-bulgaria","tag-cooperation","tag-courts","tag-croatia","tag-democracy","tag-department","tag-elections","tag-equality","tag-eu-election","tag-eu-funding","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-human-rights","tag-hungary","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligence-services","tag-media","tag-meps","tag-parliament","tag-poland","tag-research","tag-rights","tag-rule-of-law","tag-russia","tag-services","tag-slovakia","tag-social-media","tag-tanks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}