Portugal’s far-right Chega party is poised to be the latest addition to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s new right-wing alliance, which hopes to become a European Parliament group.
Chega’s president, André Ventura, on Sunday said that he was keen to have his party’s two recently elected lawmakers join the Patriots of Europe group, which is made up of members of Orbán’s Fidesz party, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Czech Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement.
Ventura said Chega’s executive committee would vote on the matter on Tuesday. He said he was confident that more right-wing parties would soon join the parliamentary faction.
After weeks of speculation, Orbán, FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl and the ANO’s Andrej Babiš formally unveiled the new group on Sunday, which they said aimed to be “the strongest right-wing group in European politics.”
“European people want three things: peace, order and development,” Orbán wrote on X. “All they get from the current Brussels elite is war, migration and stagnation.”
Chega’s move to join Patriots of Europe is a godsend for the group: While its three founding parties have more than the 23 members required to form a new parliamentary group in the parliament, the assembly’s rules also require them to be from at least a quarter of the bloc’s 27 member countries.
With the addition of the Portuguese MEPs, Orbán’s group needs to source members from just three other states in order to be recognized as a political group within the Parliament.
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