Meloni’s EU lieutenant urges Brussels to work with Le Pen

BRUSSELS — The EU must be prepared to work closely with Marine Le Pen if she wins the French election, a top Brussels ally of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told POLITICO.

Nicola Procaccini said the EU institutions and the center-right European People’s Party must be “courageous” when it comes to working with the far-right Patriots party in Brussels, the European home of Le Pen’s National Rally, if she wins April’s presidential election, just as they were after Meloni’s victory in Rome in 2022.

“There’s no way to apply the cordon sanitaire to the French Republic,” Procaccini, leader of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, said in an interview in his office, referring to the informal agreement among mainstream parties to shut far-right forces out of power. He said Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, an MEP who would be likely to become prime minister under a Le Pen presidency, “are reasonable people, pragmatic people, like Meloni.”

Procaccini added that the French duo “will defend the national interest but without crazy things” such as hauling France out of the EU.

A Le Pen victory would turn Europe’s far-right surge into power at the EU leaders’ table, placing one of the largest countries under a euroskeptic force, and forcing the EPP, which largely governs Brussels, to work out how to deal with far-right governments without fracturing the bloc.

The last power shake-up in Brussels occurred when Meloni — whose Brothers of Italy party leads the ECR political family alongside Poland’s Law and Justice — came to power. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EPP chief Manfred Weber sought to build bridges with Meloni’s government to bring Rome into the Brussels fold.

Procaccini said he hopes Le Pen will pick the “Meloni way” of dealing with the Commission, which he said means being “pragmatic, frank, open, honest and coherent.”

He added that while “the French right historically is less pro-West than us, less pro-Europe” than Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, he is “optimistic” Le Pen will not be destructive in Brussels.

That’s not how everyone sees it playing out, though. EPP vice chair and Romanian PM candidate Sigfried Mureșan said: “I believe under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the anti-European party in France will radicalize in the next months.”

Although the National Rally is a member of the Patriots group in the Parliament, the ECR would still gain an ally if Le Pen wins, helping it push a more Euroskeptic agenda.

For example, National Rally’s proposal to halve its EU budget contribution does not concern Procaccini. On the contrary, he welcomed it, saying his group “doesn’t believe in a super-giant budget.”

Right-wing majority

Since the 2024 European election, the EPP has increasingly relied on votes from groupings to its right in Parliament to pass measures such as laws scrapping EU green rules and toughening migration policy.

EPP chief Weber has repeatedly laid out his party’s three red lines for cooperation, which are being pro-European, supporting the rule of law, and backing Ukraine.

He and his lawmakers say the EPP does not negotiate with far-right groups, but insists that if they can pass their own positions with votes from the far-right, they will do so. In July, the EPP expelled a lawmaker who had organized an event with the far-right Patriots and Europe of Sovereign Nations groups at which they called for the dismantling of the cordon sanitaire.

EPP lawmakers generally view cooperation with the Patriots and National Rally as difficult, if not impossible, given their fundamentally different visions for the EU’s future. In early September, the leader of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats in Parliament, Niclas Herbst, told POLITICO that the EPP should rule out any cooperation with the Patriots and instead build a strong centrist coalition to prevent populist forces from scoring victories in Parliament ahead of the 2029 EU election.

Procaccini said the EPP still wanted to keep its center-left Social Democrat allies onside but argued that the EPP needs to be “courageous” and use the right-wing majority more openly to roll back parts of the Green Deal passed during the previous term.

“They know very well that we need a center-right majority” to cut down the Green Deal legislation, he said, “but the problem is that the EPP doesn’t want to have a relationship with the Patriots.”

Procaccini called the EPP’s refusal to engage formally with the Patriots anti-democratic, arguing that politicians should vote based on substance rather than ideology.

He said ECR lawmakers sometimes negotiate with the Patriots and then with the EPP, acting as informal mediators because the EPP does not want to deal directly with the Patriots, “but there’s not a playbook, it happens sometimes, often, but it’s not a scheme,” Procaccini said.

“I hope there’s no need [for] this role, but if there’s a need to be a sort of bridge, we are able to be the bridge” with the National Rally, he said.

Until the 2029 EU election, the priority should be to continue rolling back parts of the Green Deal and boost competitiveness, Procaccini said.

Gabriel Gavin contributed to this report.