MEP Charlie Weimers says his party has had to consider ‘other options’ in light of Orbán’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The mere specter of Viktor Orbán is causing ructions on the right wing of the European Parliament.
Leading Sweden Democrats lawmaker Charlie Weimers suggested in written comments to POLITICO’s EU Election Playbook on Friday that he could pull his MEPs out of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group if Orbán’s Fidesz MEPs join up.
Orbán himself has openly expressed a desire to join the ECR — dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law & Justice party. The former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has also said he’s open to bringing in Fidesz. Meloni and Orbán have developed close ties at the European Council, with the Italian prime minister increasingly seen as a bridge between Budapest and Brussels.
Today, not even close. The party has neo-nazi roots, but the vast majority of the “old-guard” are long gone (afaik), most of them ending up in AFS (swedish equivalent of AFD) or Nordfront (actual nazis). If someone behaves questionably, they tend to be thrown out head-first rather promptly.
The SD gained popularity and won their platform by a) becoming more moderate and b) being the only mainstream-ish party to speak out against the mass immigration waves of the 2010s, something which they at the time were entirely shunned for. Today however, almost all politicians agree that the open door policy for refugees and economic migrants went too far.
Many of our problems here in Sweden today have to some degree been caused or exacerbated by that careless era (not that there weren’t problems before). Seeing welfare systems be dismantled, schools closing, worsening healthcare, infrastructure etc. etc. whilst at the same time huge amounts of resources were diverted to immigrants pushes folks in that direction. It also really doesn’t help that many kinds of violent crime previously entirely unheard of have become commonplace in less than adecade.
They said things would go to shit, things went to shit, now more than a fifth of Swedish voters voted for them in the last election, making them the 2nd largest party.
All in all it’s not that surprising that bringing folks from one cultural extreme into a society at the opposite cultural extreme ends up causing tensions and issues…