FF comes in from the cold and begins the Liberal embrace

FIANNA Fáil took its first step towards officially joining the Liberal group in Europe this week when the bureau of the European Liberal Democrat party (ELDR) agreed to recommend its membership.

The Liberals have invited the Taoiseach Brian Cowen to lunch before the EU summit on Thursday where he is to meet the other four European prime ministers who also belong to the ELDR.

FF MEPs are upset by the move, however, as for the past five years Ireland South MEP Brian Crowley has been the co-president of the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) group and a big number of its staff, including its secretary general, has been Irish.

But the UEN is unlikely to survive after June’s elections with the decision by the British Conservatives to quit the European People’s Party and form their own group in the parliament.

They are looking for MEPs from other countries to join them and so far the Czech ODS, to which the ruling party in the Czech Republic belongs, has confirmed it is willing to leave the EPP and join the Tory group. Two members of the UEN — the Kaczynski twins’ Polish Law and Justice Party and the Italian National Alliance — have indicated they intend to join the Tories.

The British party will need MEPs from six countries to qualify as a recognised political group in the parliament after the elections, but this is not expected to be a problem. The real challenge will be to find partners not on the extremes of the EU.

In a desperate bid for survival, the UEN has been approaching other political parties in Europe, including the newly formed Lijst DeDecker in Belgium, to join them. But they are facing competition from both the Tories and Declan Ganley’s Libertas party, which is on an EU-wide hunt for members. These two could, of course, end up in the same group in the parliament if Libertas succeeds in having members elected in June.

But before getting to that stage Mr Ganley’s group has the more urgent job of finding candidates to run under its banner. So far they have announced just two French politicians willing to do so. Mr Ganley has confirmed that he will also run.

But the quest for candidates is proving difficult as politicians say they would find it difficult to convince voters to cast their ballot for a party from a foreign country.

Libertas’s manifesto was due to be launched in Rome on March 25 but has now been postponed. The party’s credibility has been undermined by the accusations of two politicians claiming signatures were improperly used to win Libertas EP approval, and by the Standards in Public Office report that they hindered investigations into the source of their referendum funding.

Many are predicting that the next European Parliament will continue to have the two large groups, the centre right EPP and the Socialists at its core, but the usual batch of smaller groups will be composed of MEPs of more extreme right and left.

At least with FF safely in out of the cold with the Liberals, the party is less likely to find itself in a group with Libertas or the Tories simply to qualify for status and funding.