The members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) met on Tuesday February 18 in Brussels.
The members of the Committee were due to vote on a report, drafted by Andrzej Halicki (PPE, Poland), giving the political guidelines to the European Commission for the spending of the huge 2026 EU-budget.
These guidelines are usually approved by the majority, and disapproved by the opposition. However, in a remarkable outcome, the draft report only got 25 votes in favour, with a clear 37 against and 5 abstentions.
With this vote, the so-called ‘old majority’ in the European Parliament lies in shatters.
The ESN MEPs opposed this draft report for several reasons:
• The report calls for continued ‘direct funding to civil society organisations’, while NGOs receive €1.7 billion in European funding every year, and this funding has led to massive corruption scandals;
• The report wants to increase the Union’s support ‘to counter hate speech’, while Europe needs more freedom of speech;
• The report asked to ‘fight the spread of disinformation at a large scale and develop more effective countermeasures’, while this is a pretext for unacceptable censorship against dissident voices and opinions.
The votes of the ESN Group, represented by MEPs Ewa ZAJACZKOWSKA (Konfederacja, Poland), Mary KHAN (AfD, Germany) and Petar VOLGIN (Revival party, Bulgaria) were again crucial in making this strong signal for freedom of speech and a clear stance against mass immigration.
