By DPA
Vienna : Rightist parties from Austria, Belgium, France and Bulgaria are to form a new “Patriotic European Party”, Austria’s Freedom Party announced on Friday.
The new party, consisting of the Freedom Party, Belgium’s nationalist Vlaams Belang party, the French Front National, and the Bulgarian nationalist party Ataka, will, however, lack the strength to form a faction in European Union Parliament (EP).
In November 2007, the EU’s far-right coalition the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) had collapsed after the Romanian delegates withdrew over a dispute with Italian right-wing politician Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of dictator Benito Mussolini. Without the five Romanian MEPs, the faction lacked the necessary 20 seats for forming a faction.
In Romania’s EU elections in late November the Greater Romania failed to overcome the five-percent hurdle for the European Parliament.
Further details are to be announced later Friday in Vienna, the Austrian press agency reported.