International

Slowly but surely negotiations between the various political groups and the individual national parties are reaching their conclusion and it is becoming clear how big each group will be. Justifiably enough, attention is focused on the groups that, on the one hand, Dutch far right leader Geert Wilders, and on the other the British party UKIP are looking to form. There are, however, other EU-critical voices in the EP anxious to distance themselves from the extreme right: the Conservatives on the right and, on the left, the group to which the SP belongs, the United European Left/Nordic Green Left (known, by an acronym which mixes French and English, as the GUE/NGL). Following the elections, it turns out that a much larger proportion of GUE/NGL MEPs belong to EU-critical parties than was the case beforehand. This is certainly going to make a difference in the years to come.

The GUE/NGL, the group to which the SP (and now also the Netherlands’ Party for the Animals, PvdD), belongs, has for the moment 52 of the 751 seats. This makes it the fifth biggest group, just behind the centre-right liberals of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), and the Conservatives. In the GUE/NGL the SP works mostly with like-minded, EU-critical parties of the modern left, which had before the elections five of the thirty-five seats. After them this has risen to at least thirteen and probably eighteen of the fifty-two. This makes a big difference. All of a sudden the modern left has become a factor of importance within our political group, making us more visible, both inside and outside the EP.

Now that we of the EU-critical squadron have grown to such a size we will be able to lay more emphasis on our own proposals. If parties within our political group remain attached to the pointless pumping back and forth of moneys between Brussels and national capitals via the enlargement of the EU budget, from now on opposition to this will be much more evident. Certainly now that the French have signalled that they want to support the modern left, it should be possible to make our proposals heard more clearly in the parliament’s plenary sittings.

For the SP, cooperation with the extreme right is unthinkable. This is precisely why it’s so important to make our own EU-critical voices heard, as in that way we can show that you don’t have to be asocial, like Wilders, LePen or UKIP in order to express criticism of Brussels’ meddling. If you’re 100% social you have no need to be dictated to from Brussels about our national budget (austerity), or our public services (liberalisation and privatisation). That this social, EU-critical voice is going to ring out a little more loudly is, therefore, pure gain.