The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the resolution, but what about the 12 MEPs who voted against? Who were they, and what were their motives?
The recent ‘Qatargate’ scandal that has rocked Brussels, and which has seen Eva Kaili, Vice-President of the European Parliament, and others incarcerated amid charges of accepting largess from Qatar in return for political favours, has raised very serious questions over the integrity of the institution itself.
On January 19th, the European Parliament, sitting in Strasbourg, voted on The establishment of a tribunal on the crime of aggression against Ukraine. As anticipated, this received overwhelming support from the members.
However, a number of members voted against the initiative. “Who are they, and why would an elected EU politician, in the face of hard evidence of the atrocities being committed in Ukraine by Putin’s savages, vote against such a worthy initiative,” many people have asked. And in the context of Qatargate, so they should.
Let’s take a look at them, shall we?
French MEP Gilbert Collard is a member of the nationalist Reconquête! party, founded in late 2021 by Éric Zemmour, a failed Presidential candidate in 2021 known for his past support of the Putin regime, having expressed his admiration “first of all for being a Russian patriot and secondly for having straightened out his country after the terrible decade of the 1990s… He has made his country a great, feared power again.” Zemmour has himself changed tack slightly and described Putin’s actions this year as “unspeakable and reprehensible acts”.
Many felt at the time that Zemmour was a faux candidate placed in order to take votes away from Marine Le Pen, who was polling well and was in fact a serious threat to Macron. Her own party, Front Nationale, was itself bankrolled by Russia, reportedly in return for her support for the 2014 referendum that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Collard himself is still toeing the line however: as recently as September of last year he was speaking out against EU sanctions against Russia which have had a crippling effect on the Russian economy, and have hit the country’s oligarchs hard. The Kremlin has spent considerable time and resources on stirring up criticism and spreading disinformation on the effectiveness of the sanctions in the EU institutions and in the member states.
Collard was named in the Atlantic Council’s publication The Kremlin’s Trojan Horses (2016).
Another French MEP to vote against the tribunal is Hervé Juvin, a member of Rassemblement National which in effect is Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale re-branded.
Hynek Blaško is a member of the Czech Svoboda a přímá demokracie, a right-wing populist political party, who opposes opposes military aid to Ukraine, another argument that the Kremlin would be very pleased to hear. In May of last year he addressed a crowd of nearly 500 protesters in Prague, declaring that the government must be forced “to stop sending arms to Ukraine.”
Dutch MEP Marcel de Graaff is a member of the far right Forum voor Democratie party. In April 2020 Politico published allegations that party leader, Thierry Baudet, had appeared to have ties with Russia, along with suggestions that he had received payments from a “Russian with ties to Vladimir Putin “.
Two Slovak MEPs voted against the initiative:
Mirosloav Radačovský of the Slovak Patriot party, described as “Russophile” and “nationalist.” Radačovský is another who can be relied on to give present a veneer of respectability to the Putin regime, having performed the role of independent observer during Russian elections.
Milan Uhrík is the leader of hnutie Republika, a nationalist party that seeks a reform of the EU effectively handing powers back to member states, and which considers NATO to be a “tool of geopolitical influence and will of military-industrial interests.”
Prior to the vote on the tribunal, he asked: “When will there be a tribunal to investigate the war crimes of the Americans in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya or crimes in Donbass? When will there be a court that will investigate the non-transparent purchase of vaccines, which was carried out directly by the President of the European Commission, Leyenová. When will someone investigate the collapses and deaths that are starting to occur after vaccines and bad vaccination policies? When will the culprits who conditioned the European gas pipeline Nord Stream and thus cut off Europe from gas be punished?”
The above MEPs are mainly from the far-right of the political spectrum, which has been courted by the Kremlin almost since the arrival of Putin. Such political parties – traditionally cash-strapped and isolated – have over recent years received significant funding from Moscow, where they are presented as “mainstream” politicians. The investment has clearly paid off.
The European Parliament however has always contained a number, albeit diminishing, of MEPs that between them form a blend of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, and even Maoism (former President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso was a Maoist).
Their nostalgia based visions of a socialist utopia that never really happened leads them to reject the democratic and economically viable systems they blame for the failure of Communism. This was never their fault of course, this was all the fault of USA and its “lackeys,” and NATO, of course. Putin can always rely on their support.
Fellow travellers and useful idiots:
MEPs Lefteris Nikolaou-Alavanos, and Kostas Papadakis are members of the Communist Party of Greece.
Even in the context of debate over the horrors unfolding daily in Ukraine Nikolaou-Alavanos appears mostly concerned with “the attack against the leader of the October Revolution, B.I. Lenin, which is being carried out by both the reactionary Ukrainian political leadership and the current political leadership of Russia.”
“We Are Against the EU, NATO, and Chains of Capitalism,” Papadakis is on record as saying.
German MEP Özlem Demirel, of DIE LINKE meanwhile has stated “I rejected the resolution on the designation of the Russian Federation as a state facilitator of terrorism, because it is far from combating and condemning terrorism and its state sponsorship, but a geopolitical consideration and branding of the Russian Federation.”
Kateřina Konečná MEP, chairwoman of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic has said: “At this moment, the Czech government, the European Union and NATO are doing nothing but adding fuel to the fire.. I call on all EU institutions to use their influence, take the initiative and start conducting peace and diplomatic negotiations.”
Sandra Pereira and João Pimenta Lopes are members of Partido Comunista Português. As well as voting against the tribunal, in November of last year both also voted against a resolution adopted by the European Parliament declaring Russia a state “sponsor of terrorism” over its war in Ukraine, and earlier in the year voted against sanctions against Russia.
The full results of the vote can be found HERE on page 24. Note that while 14 MEPs are shown as voting against the resolution, 2 subsequently changed their votes to support the initiative. This is quite a common occurence as it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with the pace of voting which is done electronically.
Main image: Fred MARVAUX, European Parliament.
