The Authority for European Political Parties and Foundations on Wednesday triggered a process that could strip the Europe of Sovereign Nations party of its right to exist as a political party and cut off its funding. The move comes as the bloc’s watchdog says the party, which is home to Alternative for Germany, may have broken the values that underpin the European Union.
Pascal Schonard told the Council of the EU in a letter that the authority had found evidence that cast doubt on the compliance of the ESN party with EU values. The watchdog laid out its case in a 300-page letter filled with court rulings, screenshots and social media posts from MEPs and party lawmakers. It cited anti-immigration, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric, including calls for remigration and a comparison of homosexuality with pedophilia.
One of the most striking entries in that file was a post this month by Tomasz Michał Grabarczyk, who wrote: “Israel is not just a criminal state. Israelis are a nation of criminals.” The letter also focuses on Bulgaria’s Revival, saying it cooperates openly with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and accusing it of helping drive violent protests in Sofia and attacks on the European Commission delegation in February 2025.
The watchdog’s case does not stop there. It highlights a May 2025 decision by German intelligence to classify Alternative for Germany as a right-wing extremist organization, even though a Cologne administrative court blocked that classification while still finding the party program contrary to human dignity and freedom of religion. In other words, the authority is building a record that goes well beyond one politician, one post or one protest.
The friction in the file is that the Europe of Sovereign Nations party and the Europe of Sovereign Nations political group in the European Parliament are not the same thing. The party is the legal entity facing the watchdog process. The political group, with 27 MEPs, is separate. Yet the party is slated to receive more than €2 million in subsidies from the European Parliament in 2026, which means the ruling could reach directly into the group’s political ecosystem even if it does not touch the lawmakers themselves.
That separation matters because ESN was founded after the 2024 EU election by Alternative for Germany and operates alongside a parliamentary group that gives the movement institutional weight in Brussels. If the authority’s process advances, the party could lose both its formal status and the money that helps sustain it. For European institutions, the case is also a test of how far they are willing to go when a party they finance is accused of violating the democratic values it is supposed to respect.
The timing of the move gives it added force today. The authority has chosen to act after compiling a lengthy record of statements and conduct that it says put ESN at odds with EU standards, and it is doing so while the party still holds its place in the wider far-right network built around Alternative for Germany. That makes the next step unusually consequential: whether the process becomes a sanction that changes ESN’s future, or a warning that stops short of expulsion. On the record the authority has assembled, it is hard to see this as a symbolic gesture.
In a separate political drama far from Brussels, Jill Biden said she was frightened by Joe Biden’s June 2024 debate against Donald Trump and believed he might have been having a stroke. In an interview tied to her memoir, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, she said, “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never” and added, “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race a month later, with 107 days left until the general election, and endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. He became the first sitting president to pull out of a presidential race since Lyndon B. Johnson stepped aside in March 1968. Harris took the nomination about three months before the election and lost to Donald Trump. Jill Biden’s comments do not change that history, but they sharpen the picture of a decision that reshaped the race and came, by her account, from a moment of private alarm that had public consequences.
