“We hope that the Committee of Independent Eminent Persons will exercise the legally required neutrality, even though people with clear political affiliations … have been appointed,” said Alexander Sell, vice president of the Europe of Sovereign Nations, and the president of its foundation. The ESN is the European home of the Alternative for Germany party.
“In a true democracy, party representatives should not be involved in decisions regarding the funding of their political rivals,” Sell said.
In July, the European Parliament green-lighted the process to deregister and defund ESN after the authority alleged breaches of EU values, including anti-immigration, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric, as first reported by POLITICO.
The ESN party is a separate legal entity from the ESN political group in the European Parliament, which is home to 27 MEPs. Political groups are parliamentary factions, while parties are broader alliances of national parties that are funded through the EU budget. The ESN political group doesn’t face sanctions.
The committee will have two months to issue an opinion once it gets all the documentation, and then the authority will make a final decision.
Choosing the eminent members
From the Council side, only two candidates were put forward by individual member states, said an EU official, granted anonymity to speak freely about the selection process: German professor of European law Pia Lange and Lithuania’s Linas Kontrimas, who ran to be an MEP in 2019 for a party affiliated with the European Conservatives and Reformists.