Orban's new Patriots for Europe group is targeting the council, not the parliament

On Sunday (30 June), 24 hours ahead of the official start of Hungary's rotating EU presidency, Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) chairman Herbert Kickl, former Czech prime minister and ANO leader Andrej Babiš and Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party announced the official creation of a new nationalist and sovereign-tist political group on the European stage, the Patriots for Europe (Patriots).

According to the trio's plans, the adoption of a joint manifesto and the announcement of further members will soon follow.

While the announced formation in its current form falls far short of the required threshold of 23 MEPs from at least seven European Union member states, the dismissive attitude of early commentators towards the group and its perceived influence is not necessarily justified.

While the first impression may be that the Patriots for Europe are a collection of central European naysayers and populists, there is a logic and sophistication to the group's design.

The group's membership clearly cuts across classic ideological and partisan divides, bringing together founding and prospective members with very different previous European party affiliations: FPÖ comes from the radical right Identity and Democracy (ID) group, which it shared with Marine Le Pen's National Rally and Matteo Salvini's League, ANO from the liberal Renew, while Orbán's Fidesz comes from the ranks of unaffiliated parties after leaving the EPP in 2021.

However, these parties have one crucial thing in common. They are either in power, or polling to win their respective future national elections (which are due soon, in the case of Austria this autumn, and in the Czech Republic in 2025.)

The group is not optimised to influence EU politics in the European Parliament, and for good reason.

Orbán, the most likely mastermind behind the initiative, has understood that radical right parties not only have divergent interests on the European stage, but that their influence in the parliament can also be significantly limited by the political centre.

This is especially true when the main goal of the key figureheads of the radical right, such as Georgia Meloni or Le Pen, is actually cooperation with and integration into the centre.

Seat at the table

Orbán understood that there are different ways to maximise the influence of a group, and that a political group can be optimised to exert influence not in the parliament, but actually through the Council. And it does not need the 'big fishes' for that purpose, but only those, however small they are, who are most likely to sit at the Council table after their next national elections.

This logic can certainly be extended to other parties in the wider central European region: Robert Fico's governing Smer in Slovakia, whose membership has just been suspended by the Socialists & Democrats (S&D) group, or Janez Janša's SDS in Slovenia (currently a member of the European People's Party), a likely candidate to lead the next Slovenian government in two years' time, and, last but not least, the elephant in the room, Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS).

If the Patriots succeed in uniting these important central European parties, they will have a critical mass and gravitational force that would make it no longer difficult to meet the official thresholds for European political groups.

While these parties may certainly disagree on several issues, this won't necessarily prevent them from working together. The Patriots group is designed to pool populist opposition to certain low-hanging fruits of European politics, such as immigration, the greening of Europe's agricultural sector, or the proposed ban on internal combustion engines, and exploit that oppositional politics for the domestic political purposes of its members.

The group can also provide a valuable resource to its members by enabling them to re-emerge as influential veto players on the European stage, as they did in the heyday of the Visegrad Group between 2015 and 2017.

While the Patriots will be far from a blocking minority in the council at the beginning, they will be a considerable force to reckon with, and their size and influence could certainly grow as a consequence of the upcoming Austrian and Czech national elections. Soon the number of PfE prime ministers may exceed even the combined number of ECR and ID colleagues in the European Council. 

Will the establishment of the Patriots lead to growing tensions with the ECR and ID groups and their leading figures such as Meloni and Le Pen? Not necessarily.

For PM Orbán, who will certainly be seen as the symbolic leader and mastermind of the group for the time being, such a political success on the European stage will only allow him to speak again more-or-less on an eye-level with Meloni and Le Pen.

As his influence grows with the group formation, Orbán will certainly feel both emboldened and protected to take more risks and use the opportunities offered by the Hungarian presidency to troll the European Union and reap the political benefits of certain conflicts. 

Whether the Patriots will succeed in establishing a new political group remains to be seen in the coming weeks. But one can certainly see a kind of ominous political innovation here: a political group tailored to represent fundamental opposition to mainstream EU policy and to maximise influence not in the European Parliament but through the Council of the EU.