Pedro Marques MEP is concerned about the rise of the extreme right to power in Italy. The socialist accuses the traditional right of normalizing these anti-democratic parties.
“Unfortunately, it has been happening in several European countries how the consequences of war affect people’s lives. These extreme right-wing parties blame migrants, homosexuals, they have a racist and xenophobic discourse and with this they have been capturing voters based on the suffering of the people”, he explained to TSF Peter Marques.
The socialist MEP considers that, due to coalitions with the extreme right, the “traditional right is also responsible for the normalization of the extreme right”, referring not only to the Italian example, but also to the Swedish, Portuguese (in the Azores) and to Spanish.
Pedro Marques warns that the “xenophobic rhetoric” of the extreme right against the rights of minorities must be “stopped”: “We have European values and European rules, and we cannot accept this type of rhetoric transformed into governance in Europe.” that Italy now join Mr Orbán and even the Polish government in this kind of attitude.
The socialist MEP stresses that the European institutions should only accept democratic governments that respect the rules. Pedro Marques assumes that the suspension of European funds can be a solution if Italy does not respect the integrity of community regulations, something that has already happened, for example, with Hungary and Poland.
Suspension of European funds?
“We are going to demand from the European Commission total supervision of compliance with European standards. We have European rules of conditionality, including for access to European funds, conditionality in the operation of the rule of law and these rules will have to be applied ”, he defends.
The socialist admits that the sanctions imposed on Russia and the impact on the cost of living for Europeans could help the extreme right to come to power.
“The risk is real. Since the beginning of this situation [a guerra na Ucrânia] that we have asked for in the European Parliament and, in the meantime, we have already managed to get the European Commission to present these proposals. We ask for proposals that better distribute the effort to face this war and that give more support to European families in difficulty”, he says.
“When families are suffering the most, there is always a real risk of this far-right siren song, easy talk and always blaming others, strangers, outsiders and ethnic minorities,” he says.
According to partial results, the right-wing and extreme-right coalition -led by the Brothers of Italy party and which also includes Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Força Italia party- obtained between 44.16% of the votes in the legislatures.
The centre-left bloc, led by Enrico Letta’s Democratic Party, is expected to get 26% of the vote.
Source: TSF
