BRUSSELS — Marieke Ehlers has one of the most important jobs in Europe’s far right: Turning a movement built on opposing Brussels into one capable of shaping its laws.
She’s the chief whip of the Patriots for Europe, the third-largest group in the European Parliament, at a time when the far right is playing a much larger and more influential role both in Brussels and across the continent.
Ehlers takes on her new role as the so-called cordon sanitaire — in which centrist forces agreed to keep the far right away from decision-making — has been dismantled.
“We are the main opposition in this house,” Ehlers, a Dutch lawmaker from Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom (PVV), told POLITICO in an interview in her office in Brussels the day after she was elected chief whip on June 3.
The far-right strategy changed after the 2024 EU election. The growth of the Patriots in the election meant the center-right European People’s Party (the Parliament’s largest political family) could count on parties to its right to pass legislation, snubbing its traditional center-left and liberal allies.
That created a headache for EPP leader Manfred Weber. Although some factions within his group have pushed for closer cooperation with the far right, he has come under pressure from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who warned that Weber “knows that we do not want this cooperation” and that “there will be consequences if necessary.”
“Manfred Weber now bears responsibility for this,” Merz added.
Far-right forces, however, saw an opening.
Rather than remain a protest movement on the Parliament’s fringes, far-right groups such as France’s National Rally (whose Jordan Bardella is the Patriots’ leader), Wilders’ PVV, and Spain’s Vox — united under the Patriots for Europe banner. They embraced a strategy of compromise and coalition-building aimed at turning electoral gains into legislative influence.
Few people have helped realize that shift more than Ehlers, who is tasked with turning the Patriots, which has 84 lawmakers, into a reliable partner for parliamentary majorities.
The Patriots have teamed up with the EPP on tougher migration laws and environmental deregulation measures. Now their sights are set on rolling back the phaseout of combustion-engine cars.
“There are some files where we see an opportunity where either we can steer them in the direction that we want them … or we are trying to be pragmatic by saying: if there’s a left-wing majority, it will be way worse,” she said.
Learning how to work together required a carefully planned strategy. At first, the Patriots deliberately supported the EPP’s proposals “without asking for much” in return, to prove they could be trusted. “That has 100 percent changed,” said Ehlers. “Our vote is no longer for free.”
Ehlers — who is a first-time MEP but knows the Parliament well after working for six years for the now-defunct far-right Identity and Democracy group — has been on the frontline of the Patriots’ new, pragmatic strategy.
She led the group in negotiations on a law aimed at ramping up deportations — one of several landmark files on which the EPP joined forces with right-wing and far-right parties.
“For the Patriots, it would have been much easier just to vote against the return regulation,” she said, as the group opposes migration policy being drawn in Brussels, believing that’s a job for national capitals. “But we realized, if we do not cooperate now to form this right-wing majority, the left-wing proposal that would then have a majority would be much, much worse.”
A willingness to play the Brussels political game is unusual for a group made up of ideologically diverse nationalist parties united mainly by their desire to repatriate powers from Brussels to capitals, and which have traditionally shown little interest in working in the EU institutions.
Yet Ehlers pushed back against the idea that the far-right camp’s strategy to Brussels has changed: “We are now the third-largest group, and so we can actually change things, and so the pragmatism, I think, would have always been there also in earlier groups, had the opportunity been there to participate.”
Working together?
The EPP says there is no structured alliance or coordination with the Patriots, insisting the far-right group supports its positions without any quid pro quo.
Ehlers rejects that.
“If they think people believe that, they are extremely naïve,” she said. Ehlers cited the EU’s deportations law as an example, saying the EPP adopted several demands from the Patriots and the other far-right group in the Parliament, the Europe of Sovereign Nations.
“They [the EPP] were literally waiting for me to give the green light from the Patriots that each and every one of our delegations would support because we needed every single vote,” said Ehlers.
The EPP’s position is that they want to keep working with the Social Democrats and liberals of Renew — but they will not shy away from relying on far-right votes to deliver their program. On the deportations bill, EPP spokesperson Daniel Köster said in November “it is a lie” that they negotiated with the Patriots.
Unlike traditional whips, who enforce party discipline through incentives and penalties, Ehler’s job is to identify issues on which the Patriots’ diverse national delegations can unite, from amendments to laws to plenary resolutions.
Another key part of her role is counting how many lawmakers in the group can support certain legislative texts, and then relaying that information to the other groups for coalition-building.
“If we want them to be willing to cooperate with us, we also need to be reliable in terms of the votes that we deliver,” she said.
The far-right firewall is effectively gone in some Parliament committees, she said, naming the constitutional affairs and civil rights committees. Ultimately, it’s all about the individuals and whether they get along.
“It depends who EPP sends as a negotiator, it depends on who the Patriot sends as negotiator and the personal relations,” she said.
Ehlers said she is “open to talk to any party” and said that behind the scenes, “where there’s no cameras and no journalists,” the Social Democrats and Patriots actually agree on some policy positions, but that publicly the center-left refuses to collaborate, even if there’s agreement on substance. “But we’re starting, at least on a personal level, to see some changes in that as well.”
The S&D has repeatedly refused to open up to the Patriots, and has asked the EPP not to count on far-right votes and negotiate with them and the liberals instead.
In the long-term, Ehlers hopes a right-wing coalition can become the norm and even lead the Council and Commission, starting a process to trim the EU’s competencies and “scale back” Brussels’ powers. The 2029 EU election, she said, could “be the point I think where it could sway in that direction.”