“It’s been demonstrated the last few years, time and time again, that Europe is dirty and needs to be cleaned up,” said O’Brien, as waiters in bowties served coffee to attendees.
The latest embarrassment for the EU — the detention on Tuesday of former Commission Vice President Federica Mogherini and ex-top diplomatic official Stefano Sannino as part of a fraud probe — has given the right plenty of ammunition.
At a panel on Thursday, French National Rally MEP Thierry Mariani and British political commentator Matthew Goodwin are set to take aim at the “deep-state web of civil service, NGOs and captured institutions.”
Alice Cordier, a French activist and president of the Nemesis Collective, a self-described feminist campaign group that has been branded a far-right Islamophobic outfit by critics, said “corruption is a big issue.” The scandals, she said, compound public anger that has so far been focused largely on the consequences of migration.
Balasz Orbán, however, was skeptical that the scandal would be a game-changer for national elections, including his own boss’s tough re-election fight next year. “Honestly,” he said, the internal corruption allegation is “not a big surprise for me, so it doesn’t add too much.”
But according to Daniel Freund, an MEP from the German Greens, the far right is not “in any position” to credibly champion the anti-corruption cause.