Spain’s VOX denies blocking party of far-right ‘rising star’ from joining ECR

Spanish far-right party VOX has rejected claims from Luise “Alvise” Perez, viewed as the ‘rising star’ in Spain’s far-right scene, that his party SALF has been denied entry into the EU’s conservative ECR group.

This was confirmed by Jorge Buxadé, the leader of VOX in the European Parliament.

The SALF party, led by Perez, an anti-system figure and provocateur, won more than 800,000 votes in the European elections in Spain on 9 June, meaning the party won three seats in the European Parliament, half the seats VOX won.

The unstoppable rise of the “new star” of the Spanish far-right has set alarm bells ringing at VOX, as both parties are competing for an ideologically similar electorate, although SALF has a more “combative” and radical rhetoric.

Although Buxadé denied that VOX wanted to prevent SALF’s entry into the ECR group – which has now become the European Parliament’s third biggest group ahead of Renew – he pointed out that it is “normal” for ideologically related political families to form a single delegation for each member country, Euractiv’s partner EFE reported.

Earlier this week, Pérez accused VOX of “institutional bullying” against SALF and of “blocking any negotiations or possible inclusion” of his party in the ECR group.

Buxadé “has demanded” from his EU allies that VOX “be the only Spanish delegation” in the group, Pérez said in a message posted on Telegram, accusing him of “sharing the hoax” that SALF would be integrated into another group along with Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second in the EU elections in Germany.

However, on 26 June, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel denied rumours circulating in Brussels that her party wanted to create a new far-right group in the European Parliament.

“This is fake news. This (new) parliamentary group does not exist. There will be (…) no union with a parliamentary group with some scattered foreign nationalist (parties) that (…) would be incompatible with the AfD in Germany. That will not happen, and therefore, we are still a long way from it,” Weidel told German television channel DW.

In addition to denying Pérez’s accusations, Buxadé insisted that the SALF leader had not “formally” asked to join the ECR group until 30 June, criticising him for failing to provide concrete evidence of this alleged blockade by VOX.

Although the leader of VOX in Brussels recalled that, according to tradition in the European Parliament, it is normal for there to be only one delegation per country, he admitted that there are exceptions. The Left group, for example, includes the radical left-wing Spanish party Podemos and the far-left Basque separatist party EH Bildu.

A few hours after learning of SALF’s unexpected success in the European elections, VOX stressed that Pérez’s party had not stolen votes from them and attributed the new far-right party’s good results to Spanish voters’ “weariness” and disappointment with Spain’s two main parties (PSOE/S&D) and Partido Popular (PP/EPP), among other reasons.

(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.Euractiv.es)

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