William Malcolm

Babiš: ANO will establish a new faction in the European Parliament

The ANO opposition movement will establish a new faction in the European Parliament (EP), details will be announced next week. The chairman of ANO, Andrej Babiš, said this in an interview with CNN Prima News today and announced it on his profiles on social networks. He has not yet indicated with whom the movement will cooperate in the faction. According to Babiš, the program of the new group will be sovereignty, security, the fight against illegal migration and to change the Green Deal for Europe. Each political group in the European Parliament, in which MPs are grouped according to their political affiliation, must have at least 23 MPs from seven EU countries. ANO will have seven representatives in the newly elected parliament.

Last week, Babiš announced that ANO would withdraw from the liberal faction Renew Europe and from the European party ALDE. According to him, the movement could not fulfill its program in them. According to the leader of the faction Valéria Hayerová, ANO’s departure from Renew Europe is a long-awaited divorce. On the X social network, she added at the time that ANO had chosen a populist path incompatible with the values ​​and identity of liberals.

Babiš repeated today that ANO tried to push through its program, but neither Renew Europe nor ALDE succeeded. Because of this, the movement decided to establish a new faction in the European Parliament. “It will be the first time in history that a Czech political entity will establish a new faction,” the former prime minister said on CNN Prima News . ANO will announce the details next week, probably on Monday. “We’ll see, it will be exciting, how many more MPs we can convince,” he added.

Information has already appeared in the media that ANO is discussing the creation of a new faction with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Slovak government parties Smér Robert Fico and Hlas, founded by the current president Petr Pellegrini. Existing or new parliamentary factions must announce their name and composition by July 15. From July 16 to 19, the inaugural plenary session of the new European Parliament, which consists of 720 MEPs, will take place in Strasbourg. They elect their chairman and 14 vice-chairmen, quaestors, chairmen and vice-chairmen of committees and delegations.