“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.
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.
