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Italian MEPs from the Lega Nord (Northern League) party during a discussion on the freedom of the press in October 2009. (AFP)

"Westerners" remain the masters of invective

We were inured to the foul mouths of populist MEPs from the new member states who took their seats in Strasbourg last June. But they can’t hold a candle to their Western European counterparts, recounts România liberă.

Published on 9 March 2010 at 17:24
Italian MEPs from the Lega Nord (Northern League) party during a discussion on the freedom of the press in October 2009. (AFP)

"You have all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” The MEPs who, in late February, were expecting a garden-variety plenary session of the European Parliament – at which they would meet for the first time the new and very first president of the European Council – were dumbfounded at the vitriol heaped upon Herman Van Rompuy by Nigel Farage of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP). Farage also called van Rompuy a "quiet assassin of European democracy and of European nation states”, by dint of the fact that he comes from “pretty much a non-country”, namely Belgium.

An incomplete apology

Those who, in view of the results of the 2009 European elections, had predicted that the advent of Eastern European politicians catalogued as “extremists” (Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles etc) would disrupt the smooth functioning of the assembly were proved wrong. The MEPs from those countries turned out to be demurely polite and blended right in with the little galaxy of independents, while the slanging matches turned out to be the privilege of “Westerners” like Dutch Islamophobic populist Geert Wilders or the British Eurosceptics.

After his tirade against Van Rompuy, the affable Polish conservative Jerzy Buzek, current president of the European Parliament, called Farage into his office and asked him to apologise, whereupon the latter quipped that, if he had to apologise to anyone, it would be to the “low-grade bank clerks” to whom he had compared the self-effacing president of the Council, though they really didn’t deserve to be humiliated in such a way.

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Perverting the smooth running of democracy

At a loss for arguments, the urbane Buzek, one-time member of the Solidarity trade union, announced that he had fined Farage by freezing his parliamentary pay for 10 days – the equivalent of €3,000. Peanuts! And yet Farage officially protested against the penalty, saying he failed to see where the problem was – thereby prolonging the spectacle. In British parliamentary life, said Farage, such vigorous interjections are customary. PMs interrupt and insult one another all the time, which, after all, is part of the game of democracy.

"Westerners", with their bogus manners, pervert the smooth running of parliamentary democracy by shifting the debate from the content – Van Rompuy has no charisma and was a lousy choice for EU president – to the form: Van Rompuy is a “damp rag” and an “assassin of democracy". One hears the same sort of discourse, similarly harsh and peppered with xenophobic allusions, from certain right-wing populist parties in Italy, where they are in power, and in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party looks primed to take power after the general elections this June.

Compared to these uninhibited bigwigs, our Corneliu Vadim Tudor and Gigi Becali or their Bulgarian nationalist counterparts from Ataka seem polite and timorous. All things considered, we still have a thing or two to learn from Europeans, even about the art of political buffoonery.

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