Among the various headaches keeping European Union leaders awake at night is the prospect of a thumping Conservative victory in the UK’s next general election, which must be held by June 2010. The fear is that the new Tory government would be so anti-EU that it would make the 1979-1997 governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major look like Jacques Delors’s European Commission in its heyday.
The nightmare inched one step closer on Wednesday when the Conservatives confirmed their intention of leaving the European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s main centre-right political group. This is a club with members from all over the 27-nation bloc. It is the largest group in the parliament, with about 37 per cent of the seats, and it will probably retain that position after June’s European Parliament elections.
But the Tories, fed up with the EPP’s enthusiasm for closer EU integration and its support for the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, say they plan to establish a separate group in the legislature after the elections.
Predictably, the Conservatives’ opponents in the UK say the Tories, if they went ahead, would be putting themselves on the “lunatic fringe” of European politics. Is this true? Let’s have a look and see who might be the Tories’ bedfellows in a new right-of-centre, pan-European political family.
The most likely candidates are the Czech Civic Democrats (who have a helpful English-language website) and Poland’s Law and Justice party (Polish only, as far as I can tell, but here’s what the party slogan translates as: “Patriotism, solidarity, modernity”). Neither fits neatly into mainstream western European definitions of moderate centre-right politics. Both have earned a reputation for being “difficult” on the EU stage. Like the Tories, however, they are not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. They should be taken seriously.
Other possible companions for the Conservatives are Italy’s Northern League, which is distinctly more right-wing. The League, I fear, could embarrass the Tories with its hostility to foreigners and rather peculiar version of northern Italian ethnic politics. Then there is the Danish People’s Party, which has a similar brand of conservative, anti-immigrant populism. Finally, there are some minor parties in Belgium, Latvia and Lithuania.
All in all, leaving the EPP does not look like the best way for the Tories to maximise their influence in the European Parliament. But I doubt that bothers them much. If it goes down well with party activists and supporters in the UK, why think twice?
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