BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Hungary’s ruling nationalist Fidesz party quit the main pan-European centre-right bloc, the European People’s Party, on Thursday, two years after it was suspended for policies criticised by mainstream conservatives as authoritarian.
“It’s time to say goodbye,” Fidesz Vice Chairwoman Katalin Novak wrote on Twitter, posting a brief letter which said it “no longer wishes to maintain its membership in the (EPP), thus resigns.”
The EPP suspended Fidesz ahead of European parliamentary elections in 2019, but stopped short of expelling it permanently, despite Prime Minister Viktor Orban having campaigned with posters that demonised EPP member Jean-Claude Juncker, then head of the European Commission.
“I think that Mr Orban is a long way from basic Christian Democratic values,” Juncker said at the time.
Fidesz quit the EPP’s group in the European Parliament earlier this month.
The EPP is the biggest party in the European Parliament, and its largest national contingent is Angela Merkel’s German conservatives.
Orban’s nationalist policies have long been seen as a better fit with smaller European blocs to the right of the EPP, such as the eurosceptic ECR that includes Poland’s ruling Law and Justice, or the rightwing ID that includes France’s National Rally and Italy’s far-right League. Orban has said in the past he was in talks with likeminded parties about a new political alliance.
Orban, 57, has been in office since 2010. He faces elections in 2022, with the opposition united against him for the first time and opinion polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
(Reporting by Marton Dunai; Editing by Peter Graff)
