Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zezana Muncheng and Jack Smith. Today we talk about the European elections. They are June the 9th, just a couple of weeks ahead. And we have had an interesting event occurring. Maybe we call it a pivotal event of these elections so far.

The campaign hasn't been particularly exciting, but this is, after Marine Le Pen succeeded

to expel the AFD from her group in the European Parliament, the identity and democracy group,

she has now made the proposal to team up to merge with Maloney's

European Conservatives and Reformists, the EECR.

They're the two groups of the right, some would say the far right.

And Maloney responded almost immediately to say that she is open to the idea.

Susanna, what's behind Le Pen's shift?

Le Pen and her Rassamble Mont Nacional had some difficulties with the German counterpart, the AFD, for some time. So this has been coming for some time now. The two parties have a very different

outlook on what is their party's

goal in these European elections. Marie Le Pen is very cautious to use these European elections

as sort of a stepping stone towards the residential elections in 2007. Whilst for the RFD, it's basically

the opposite to provoke and oppose whether they can the coalition

government. And in that sense, they have a very different outlook of what they want to achieve

with these European actions. Then there were a couple of four paths from the Germans from the

RFD. These differences, Marine-de-Pen had tried to mend them with Alice Vidal earlier on, but the problem is that the

AFD is not really kind of a top-down organization where when you meet the leader that this is

actually going to be reflected in the Vati.

So the difficulties continued.

And then there came Maximilian Krah, who is the lead candidate of the RFD in the European

elections with a statement that was just the trigger of it.

And the statement was basically saying, just because someone was in the SS, it doesn't

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