Europe on brink of COLLAPSE if Victor Orban's party snubbed by EU parliament warns Sarkozy

Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has been suspended from the EU Parliament’s EPP bloc after the party ran anti-migration campaigns and alleged violations of rule of law principles. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out in defence of Viktor Orban on Saturday, insisting on the need to strengthen European unity after the EU parliament’s main centre-right grouping voted to suspend the Fidesz party.  “Two things lie at the very core of Europe: first of all unity. Because without unity, Europe doesn’t exist… And compromise. Because without compromise, Europe doesn’t exist. Our differences oblige us to find common ground,” he said at a conference on migration in Budapest. 

“Hungary is deeply European in its history, culture and values. It is a great democratic country,” Mr Sarkozy, a conservative of Hungarian origin, continued, before lavishing praise on his “friend” Mr Orban. 

He said: “For me, someone like Viktor who is able to win three consecutive terms … is someone who commands respect. You did what I was incapable of doing. That could be why people have a problem with you – because you won. I like having friends who are winners. I don’t want all my friends to be losers.”

The decision by the European People’s Party (EPP) to suspend Fidesz lawmakers last week came after calls from allies, political opponents and rights groups for the party to be disciplined over its anti-migrant campaigns and controversial overhaul of the judicial system. 

Mr Orban’s authoritarian leadership style and eurosceptic, anti-immigration policies have long put him at loggerheads with many more moderate members of the EPP grouping. 

The Hungarian nationalist, for his part, cast his party’s suspension as a victory, saying he had beaten back an “attack” by the 13, referring to the mainly northern European conservative parties that had called for his expulsion.

“We voluntarily agreed to suspend our participation” until the committee report, Mr Orban told a news conference after the decision.

“I sat through the meeting with the departure letter in my right hand. I’d have walked over and handed it over if we’d been excluded.” 

For Mr Orban, membership in the EPP parliamentary bloc gives him mainstream respectability and leverage, two things that other European populists lack. 

But the suspension was not enough for critics of the EPP, who say it looked the other way as Mr Orban went about dismantling democratic norms and the rule of law in Hungary.

Mr Orban argues there had been no discussion on the substance of his policies that many in the EPP have criticised, including Fidesz’s anti-immigration stance and attacks on the bloc’s Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker.

Mr Juncker was the target of a Hungarian government anti-EU poster campaign accusing him of fuelling mass immigration into Europe and depicting him as a puppet manipulated by Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

French President Emmanuel Macron also commented on Fidesz’s expulsion, saying that the EPP’s decision to suspend rather than expel the hardline party was proof of a “clan mentality.”

“This decision looks tremendously like all the decisions that have been taken for many years, that’s to say it gives priority to the clan mentality instead of the strength of ideas,” the 41-year-old centrist told reporters on the sidelines of a European Council summit in Brussels. 

Mr Macron added that he was struggling to understand the reasoning behind the EPP’s decision. 

“I understood that nothing would change for Fidesz after the EPP vote,” he said. 

source: express.co.uk