Far right cries censorship after exclusion from EU election debate 

BRUSSELS — The organizer of the scandal-hit Eurovision Song Contest is facing another controversy after excluding the far right from a debate in the European Parliament next week, over of a disagreement around how the EU should nominate the European Commission president.

The European Broadcasting Union invited five political factions — the far-left, Greens, socialists, liberals and center-right — to take part in its big debate on May 23, two weeks before the start of the EU election, when voters will choose 720 MEPs and kick off negotiations for the EU institutions’ most powerful jobs.

But neither the far right Identity & Democracy faction — on course to be the third-largest force in the assembly, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — nor the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists will be allowed to take part, due to their refusal to nominate an official candidate to be president of the Commission, a role held by Ursula von der Leyen, who is seeking a new term.

“We see there is a censorship [by] the European public broadcasters,” said Anders Vistisen, a Danish far-right MEP, who represented ID at a debate hosted by POLITICO and Studio Europa in Maastricht in April. 

The exclusion of ID will embolden the right-wing argument that it is undemocratically barred from important roles in the European Parliament, where a cordon sanitaire blocks it from chairing committees and leading legislative negotiations.

And it’s not just within the Parliament that the far right feel excluded: last month, three Brussels politicians attempted to shut down the National Conservatism Conference, a meeting of Europe’s hard-right featuring Nigel Farage and Viktor Orbán.

last month, three Brussels politicians attempted to shut down the National Conservatism Conference, a meeting of Europe’s hard-right featuring Nigel Farage and Viktor Orbán. | Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images

The EBU sent an email — shared with POLITICO by Vistisen — to senior politicians in ID on May 7 stating that it cannot field someone in the debate because it has not officially endorsed a lead candidate to be the president of the next Commission. 

Vistisen himself has certainly acted like a potential Commission president — even if his chances of making it are nil: He started his Maastricht debate speech outlining his plan to sack 10,000 EU civil servants, starting with von der Leyen.

But ID has not formally described him as a Spitzenkandidat, a German word meaning ‘lead candidate’. The term refers to an informal convention, employed by most political factions in the European Parliament since 2014, that aims to give the Parliament more clout when it comes to electing the Commission president. 

ID and ECR reject the Spitzenkandidat process as an overreach by the European Parliament, which according to the EU treaties has no right to nominate a candidate for the Commission president.

“I think the whole system of Spitzenkandidat has become a joke,” said Philip Claeys, the secretary general of the ID group in the Parliament.

ECR did nominate a Spitzenkandidat, Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, in 2019. But it has not done so this time.

The lead candidate plan blew up after the 2019 election, when MEPs narrowly confirmed von der Leyen in the top Commission job at the expense of the European People’s Party’s Manfred Weber — the winning Spitzenkandidat — despite having pledged to only support a lead candidate for the bloc’s most powerful role. 

It was widely interpreted as a sign that the real power to choose the Commission president still lies with national government leaders gathered in the European Council — which has made no progress implementing an electoral law reform clamored for by MEPs. 

No such thing as a Spitzen

There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a real lead candidate. 

Even von der Leyen has been denounced by rivals as a “fake” Spitzenkandidat, given that she is not running as an MEP and is therefore not directly electable. Her main rival, the Socialists’ lead candidate Nicolas Schmit, is also not running as an MEP, breaking with the tradition set by his two predecessors Martin Schulz and Frans Timmermans.

Other parties have put forward more than one candidate for the single-person role: the Greens have put forward MEPs Bas Eickhout and Terry Reintke.

The liberals have nominated three candidates, all of which ruled out running for the job of Commission president at their campaign launch event. 

Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas also slammed the EBU’s decision to ban EU flags during Saturday’s final, describing it as a gift to “the enemies of Europe.” | Johan Nilsson/AFP via Getty Images

Even politicians opposed to the far-right criticized the EBU’s decision not to allow the far-right to debate. “I would not exclude them, no,” said Domènec Ruiz Devesa, a Spanish socialist MEP who is an EU federalist, and wants the Spitzenkandidat system to work in tandem with a new EU-wide constituency of MEPs who can be elected by all voters. 

An EBU spokesperson wrote in an email: “Two parties …[ECR and ID] … have not nominated lead candidates for the Presidency of the European Commission and are therefore not eligible to take part in the Debate.”

A senior Parliament official said this was a matter for the EBU and the political parties, and said that nothing has changed compared with debates held in 2014 and 2019. 

A long week for the EBU

The EBU has had a challenging week. This year’s Eurovision, held in Malmö, Sweden, was one of the most contentious in its history, unable to escape the specter of conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Ahead of the final, thousands of protesters gathered in Malmö, many waving Palestinian flags. When Israel’s contestant, Eden Golan, took the stage, she received a mixture of boos and cheers.

Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas also slammed the EBU’s decision to ban EU flags during Saturday’s final, describing it as a gift to “the enemies of Europe.”

“It’s mind-blowing, what the EBU did,” Schinas told POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook. Schinas on Monday wrote to EBU chiefs asking for an explanation for the exclusion of EU flags, according to a letter seen by POLITICO.

The commissioner said the EBU’s decision to for “the first time” exclude flags other than those of participating countries was ill-timed given next month’s European election, and at a time when thousands of Georgian protesters were massing in the streets of Tbilisi in support of the democratic values the EU represents.