Euro far-right rejects the BNP

Friday, 19 June 2009 12:00 AM

By Ian Dunt

The British National party's (BNP) efforts to form a coalition with other extremist groups in Europe have ended in failure.

Party leader Nick Griffin had hoped to form a grouping with parties such as Italy's Northern League and France's Front National.

Parliamentary groupings require 25 MEPs from at least seven countries, which triggers up to a million euros funding for staff and office costs.

"It appears at present we are below the threshold," Mr Griffin said after talks at the European parliament in Brussels.

"We have to see how the other political groups get on with their negotiations and if they cannot do a deal whether they will deal with us."

The BNP grouping has only attracted 12 MEPs, despite wide gains for the far-right in the recent elections.

The far-right often struggles to work together across national boundaries.

In the last parliament the Greater Romania party broke up the far-right Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty group after a spat with Mussolini's daughter, Alessandro, who said all Romanians were criminals.

The Northern League's rejection of a BNP grouping will severely hinder Mr Griffin's attempts to have a strong presence in the parliament, because they carry nine MEPs.

Geert Wilder's Dutch Freedom party, which mostly sells itself on an extreme variant of anti-Muslim thought, also rejected the BNP, despite being sufficiently extreme to be banned from entering Britain.

Mr Wilder is understood to be attempting to appeal to mainstream Dutch voters, and is furiously avoiding associations with the likes of the BNP or the National Front.

The Danish People's party is also avoiding Mr Griffin. It has also tried to avoid Jean Marie Le-Pen's National Front, after he again denied the Holocaust at the parliament.

Groupings must be declared by July 14th, for the parliament's inaugural sitting.

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• europe
,
• european elections
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• foreign policy