VIENNA: Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz and the populist Czech ANO party led by Andrej Babis are forming a new alliance in the European Parliament, they announced on Sunday.

The move would reorder but possibly also split nationalist forces in the assembly, provided four more parties join. Parties from at least a quarter of the European Union’s 27 member states are needed to officially form a new political group.

While Fidesz has remained outside larger groupings since it parted ways with the mainstream centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021, the FPO is part of the Identity and Democracy political group along with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France. ANO is not part of a political group.

“Today is a historic day because today we are entering a new era of European politics,” FPO leader Herbert Kickl said in a address to the media attended by Babis and Orban convened at short notice in a Vienna hotel.

“This alliance is meant as a rocket that will bring other parties on board at the European level to join forces and give Europe a better future,” Kickl said of the “new patriotic alliance”. Former Czech prime minister Babis said the new group would be called Patriots for Europe.

All three men cited the fight against illegal immigration, which has long been a pressing concern for them, as well as transferring more powers from Brussels back to member states.

In this month’s European Parliament election, nationalist parties capitalised on voter disquiet over spiralling prices, migration and the cost of the green transition, and are looking to translate their seat gains into more influence on EU policy.

While the FPO has a clear lead in Austrian opinion polls ahead of a Sept 29 parliamentary election, Orban faces a growing threat in Hungary from the new opposition party Tisza, which said this month it would join the EPP in the European Parliament.

“Today we are creating a political formation that in my view will be off to a flying start and will very quickly become the largest group of the European right,” Orban said. “This will happen within days and then the sky is the limit,” he said.

The three men took no questions but the FPO said a press conference would be held in Brussels or Strasbourg soon with other parties joining the alliance.

It is not yet clear who would join them. Germany’s far-right Alterna­tive for Germany (AfD) announced at its party conference on Sunday that it was officially withdrawing from the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, to which the FPOe also belongs, along with France’s National Rally and Italy’s League.

Orban’s Fidesz party left the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) — the European Parliament’s biggest group — in 2021 amid accusations of Hungary’s democratic backsliding “Even if the AfD cannot yet form a joint parliamentary group with Fidesz at this point, this opens up new opportunities for the AfD to work with other parties, as the party landscape of ECR and ID as a whole is in flux,” a spokesman for AfD leader Alice Weidel said.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) is set to be the EU parliament’s third-largest force, following far-right gains at the European elections.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2024