Brussels, 09/11/2007 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 9 November, Jo Leinen (PES, Germany), the chairman of the European Parliament constitutional affairs committee, welcomed the disintegration of the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) group following the resignation of the five Romanian Partidul România Mare members (see EUROPE 9539). “For the European Parliament, this break up of the nationalist group is not a loss but a gain, because its programme and its aims are not in any way consistent with the spirit and the idea of an integrated Europe,” he said in a press release. He said that the comments of Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini (she, too, a member of ITS) that all Romanians were criminals proved that “nationalism and racism are often closely linked”. Mussolini's comments, which came after the murder of an Italian woman allegedly by a Romanian, are the reason for the resignation of the Romanian MEPs from ITS.
If the resignations of Eugen Mihäescu, Patre Popeangä, Daniela Buruianä-Aprodu, Viorica Moisuc and Cristian Stänescu are formalised during the plenary session in Strasbourg next week, ITS will lose its political group status and all the benefits attached to it (speaking time, capital contributions, etc.). The group, which is led by Bruno Gollnisch (NF) will then only have 18 members, two fewer than the 20 required. In a press release dated 6 November, Gollnisch tried in vain to calm his Romanian group members, highlighting the ITS group's “high regard for the Romanian people, the inheritor of a two-thousand year old history, and the Dacian, Latin and Greek civilisations”. (H.B.)