New Group on the EU Periphery: European Conservatives and Reformists Group
What connects Kaczynski, Klaus and Cameron? The new European Conservatives and Reformists Group connects a lot of Central- and Eastern European small parties with the British Tories. The first idea that comes to my mind is being on the peripheries of the Union. These parties have a location on the peripheries of power, influence on European events, geographically and politically, two. Mr Cameron’s Tories are leaving the strongest European parliamentary group, the EPP, to team up with parties who love isolation.
The ODS is Mr Klaus’s party, who refuses to sign the Lisbon Treaty as the president of the EU (he has a same problem with ICC and Copenhagen, too). The PiS is a populist, radical group of the Kaczynski brothers, who have been evicted from power in Poland but have caused a lot of headache in the EU beforehand.(Remember the lost Polish votes in the WWII with the square root voting formula?) I really wonder what the Tories, who are almost inevitably coming to power in a big EU member state will achieve with this not very constructive Central European allies, but they will not move the Isles closer to the Continent for sure.
The Hungarian Democratic Forum is a small centre-right party that is supposed to be federalist and seems to have left EPP because had only one MEP against the more popular Fidesz party’s 15. Their only one MEP is Mr Lajos Bokros, a former Socialist finance minister who has also a maverick image and who had run together on a ticket with a Habsburg archduke. They were among the parties who voted with yes on the first possible date to ratify the Lisbon Treaty.
Other parties in the group:Belgium: Lijst Dedecker (LDD), with 1 MEP in the New Group; Finland: Centre Party (Keskusta) – one former MEP; Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) with 1 MEP; The Netherlands: ChristianUnion (ChristenUnie) with 1 MEP; Latvian National Independence Movement (TB/LNNK) with 1 MEP. These MEPs really look like fillings in the group for the first sight as they give 4 MEPs to the 50 MEPs of the British/Polish/Czech Euroskeptics.
A Central European perspective 
