Far right, far left in European Parliament miss out on millions because of bureaucracy

BRUSSELS — The far right and far left in the European Parliament will miss out on millions in European Union funding because the paperwork is too complicated.

Two new parties in the Parliament — the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) on the far right and the European Left Alliance for the People and the Planet (ELA) on the far left — had until Monday to apply for the cash but faced overwhelming bureaucracy.

“You have no idea how complicated it is,” said a person involved in the creation of a new political party, granted anonymity to speak freely.

“My feeling is that the burden [of paperwork] is really to discourage you,” the person said.

Both parties were formed in the wake of June’s European election. Such EU-wide votes always result in a shifting of the political landscape and this time was no exception.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party started the ESN not long after being kicked out of the Identity and Democracy group (ID) because of the extreme views of its leading MEP, Maximilian Krah. After the election, ID fractured into two new far-right groups, Patriots for Europe (home to MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz) and the ESN. Now, AfD is trying to register the ESN as a political party too.

Meanwhile on the left, a number of parties, frustrated at how the Party of the European Left operates, jumped ship and started the ELA.

In EU-speak, European political parties — sometimes known as Europarties — are associations of like-minded national parties, and their function is to coordinate at the EU level as well as to organize electoral campaigns. Political groups, meanwhile, are sets of MEPs who sit together in the European Parliament.

The next step for the ESN and ELA was to apply to the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF), an obscure EU body that regulates who can and cannot be a political party, and what can and cannot be done with their money.

A pot containing €46 million is to be divided between all the Europarties, with the ESN and ELA wanting a share. The ELA’s application to become a Europarty was approved on Friday, but the ESN is still awaiting approval. If it doesn’t get the green light on Monday, it will miss out.

“In both cases they did not submit the necessary documentation [for party creation] correctly the first time” and had to resend documents in mid-September, which is “nothing surprising,” because the “process is complex,” said a Parliament official close to the matter.

The ELA submitted its party paperwork at the end of August, while the ESN only applied on Sept. 6, later than the 30 days required by the APPF.

Filling in the paperwork to become a Europarty took so much time and effort that neither the ESN nor the ELA had the resources to set up yet another entity — a political foundation (a separate but linked organization that provides parties with support via events, policy papers, research projects and training).

The pot of cash available for the foundations is smaller than that for the Europarties (€24 million versus €46 million for 2025) but is still large. According to POLITICO’s examination of the figures, the ESN could have gotten €1 million if it set up a foundation and the ELA €850,000.

*Caveat: These amounts have been calculated with the provisional party MEP lists from mid-July. Those amounts have likely changed slightly and thus the cash allocations for parties and foundations below are indicative.

The application processes have done one unusual thing: United the far right and far left, who both agree that setting up a Europarty is more important than creating a foundation.

“First things first,” Alexander Sell, an AfD MEP and chair of the ESN, told POLITICO when asked about the funding loss. “We want to do this process in the proper way. We just founded the group and now we are founding a party and I think we shouldn't rush into things.”

“One thing at a time, we want to do things well,” Manon Aubry, leader of France Unbowed, a member of the ELA, told POLITICO. “The first objective obviously is to have the party on track, which requires lot of administrative burden.”

According to POLITICO's projections, if the APPF does not approve the ESN party Monday, it could miss out on €2 million, on top of the €1 million it won't get because it didn't set up a foundation. The ELA is poised to get €1.6 million after its application to be a party was rubber-stamped on Friday.

The creation of new parties plus a decrease in the overall budget for Europarties (down from €50 million in 2024 to €46 million in 2025) mean almost all other parties will get less cash this year. The bigger the party, the more money you get. That's bad news for the European Green Party and liberal ALDE, as they suffered heavy losses in the EU election.