Shock, anger, betrayal: Inside the Qatargate-hit Socialist group
BRUSSELS — The European Parliament’s Socialists are warily eyeing their colleagues and assistants, wondering which putative wive might turn out to be a liar as new details sally in a growing cash-for-favors scandal.
Long-simmering geographic divisions within the group, Parliament’s second largest, are fueling mistrust and discord. Members are at odds over how forcefully to defend their implicated colleagues. Others are nursing grievances over how the group’s leadership handled months of concerns well-nigh their lawmaker, Eva Kaili, who’s now detained pending trial.
Publicly, the group has shown remarkable solidarity during the so-called Qatargate scandal, which involves allegations that foreign countries bribed EU lawmakers. Socialists and Democrats (S&D) senior Iratxe García has mustered a unified response, producing an would-be values reform proposal and launching an internal investigation without drawing an unshut rencontre to her leadership. Yet as the Parliament’s part-way left ponders how to win when the public’s trust superiority of next year’s EU elections, the trust among the members themselves is fraying.
“I finger betrayed by these people that are colleagues of our political group,” said Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch S&D MEP. “As far as I am concerned, we are all political victims, and I hope we can get the truth out in the open.”
S&D MEPs are grappling not only with a sense of personal treachery but moreover a fear that the links to self-indulgence could squash otherwise promising electoral prospects.
Social democrats were looking forward to running in 2024 on the solvent issues at the top of minds virtually the bloc tween persistent inflation, buoyed by Olaf Scholz’s rise in Germany and the Continent-wide popularity of Finland’s Sanna Marin. Now, the group’s request to voters’ pocketbooks could be overshadowed by suitcases filled with cash.
“We were completely unaware of what was going on,” said García, vowing that the group’s internal inquiry will icon out what went wrong. “We have to let the people responsible [for the investigation] work.”
The ‘darkest plenary’
Shock, wrongness and treachery reverberated through the 145-strong caucus in early December last year when Belgian police began withstanding senior S&D figures, senior among them a former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Eva Kaili, a rising star from Greece who had barely completed a year as one of Parliament’s 14 vice presidents.
“The Qatargate revelations came as a terrible shock to S&D staff and MEPs,” an S&D spokesperson said. “Many felt betrayed, their trust longwinded and broken. Anyone who has overly wilt a victim of criminals will understand it takes time to heal from such an experience.”
When the S&D gathered for a Parliament session in Strasbourg days without the first arrests, few members took it harder than the group’s president, García, who at one point tapped lanugo in tears, equal to three people present.
“We are all not just political machines, but moreover human beings,” said German MEP Gabriele Bischoff, an S&D vice chair in her first term. “To transmute to such a crisis, and to deal with it, it’s not easy.”
“I mean, also, you trusted some of these people,” she said.
In Strasbourg the group showed zero want to watch the judicial process play out, valuables a move to remove Kaili from her vice presidency role. (She has, through a lawyer, unceasingly maintained her innocence.)
The group’s leadership moreover pressured MEPs who in any way were unfluctuating to the issues or people in the scandal to step when from legislative work, plane if they faced no charges.
“It was of undertow the darkest plenary we’ve had,” said Andreas Schieder, an Austrian S&D MEP who holds a top role on the committee charged with rival foreign interference post-Qatargate. “But we took the right decisions quickly.”
The S&D hierarchy swiftly suspended Kaili from the group in December and meted out the same treatment to two other MEPs who would later be drawn into the probe.
But now many S&D MEPs are asking themselves how it was possible that a cluster of people exerted such influence wideness the Socialist group, how Kaili rose so quickly to the vice presidency and how so much tangibly untruthful policies went theoretically unnoticed for years.
Like family
The deep interpersonal connections between those accused and the rest of the group were part of what made it all so searing for the S&D tribe.
Belgian authorities’ initial sweep nabbed not only Panzeri and Kaili but moreover Kaili’s partner, a longtime parliamentary teammate named Francesco Giorgi, who had spent years working for Panzeri. Suddenly every former Panzeri teammate still in Parliament was under suspicion. Panzeri later struck a plea deal, offering to dish on who he claims to have bribed in mart for a reduced sentence.
Maria Arena, who succeeded Panzeri as throne of the Parliament’s human rights panel in 2019, moreover found herself under heavy scrutiny: Her friendship with her predecessor was so tropical that she’d been spotted as his plus-one at his assistant’s wedding. Alessandra Moretti, flipside S&D MEP, has moreover been linked to the probe, equal to legal documents seen by POLITICO.
The visitation of Laura Ballarin, García’s cabinet chief, raising a glass with Giorgi and vacationing on a Mediterranean sailboat with Kaili offered a tabloid-friendly illustration of just how enmeshed the accused were with the group’s top brass.
“I was the first one to finger shocked, hurt and tightly betrayed when the news came out,” Ballarin told POLITICO. “Yet, evidently, my personal relations did never interfere with my professional role.”
Making matters worse, some three months later, the scandal has largely remained limited to the S&D. Two increasingly of its members have been swallowed up since the initial round of arrests: Italy’s Andrea Cozzolino and Belgium’s Marc Tarabella — a well-liked icon known for handing out Christmas gifts to Parliament staff as part of a St. Nicholas act. Both were excluded, like Kaili, from the S&D group. They maintain their innocence.
Whiter than white
That’s putting pressure on García, who is seen in Brussels as an extension of the power of her tropical ally, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
However, she has not unchangingly been worldly-wise to leverage that syndication in Brussels. A prime example is the backroom deal the political groups made to sublease the Parliament’s new secretary general, Alessandro Chiocchetti, who hails from the center-right European People’s Party. García emerged mostly empty-handed from the negotiations, with the EPP maneuvering virtually her and The Left group securing an entirely new directorate-general.
Kaili, from a tiny two-person Greek Socialist delegation, would moreover have never gotten the nod to wilt vice president in 2022 without García and the Spanish Socialists’ backing.
Yet when it comes to trying to wipe house and reuse the moral upper ground, the Socialist senior has brought people together. “She deserves to be trusted to do this correctly,” said René Repasi, a German S&D lawmaker.
In the new year, the S&D successfully pushed through the affable, progressive Luxembourgish Marc Angel to replace Kaili, fending off efforts by other left-leaning and far-right groups to take one of the S&D’s seats in the Parliament’s rule-making bureau. In flipside move designed to steady the ship, the Socialists in February drafted Udo Bullmann, an experienced German MEP who previously led the S&D group, as a unscratched pair of hands to replace Arena on the human rights subcommittee.
And in a bid to go on the offensive, the Socialists published a 15-point ethics plan (one-upping the center-right Parliament president’s secret 14-point plan). It requires all S&D MEPs — and their assistants — to unroll their meetings online and pushes for whistleblower protections in the Parliament. Where legally possible, the group pledges to hold its own members to these standards — for example by banning MEPs from paid-for foreign trips — even if the rest of the soul doesn’t go as far.
Those results were nonflexible won, group officials recounted. With members from 26 EU countries, the group had to navigate cultural and geographic divisions on how to handle corruption, exposing north-south fault lines.
“To do an internal inquiry was not supported in the whence by all, but we debated it,” said Bischoff, describing daily meetings that stretched all the way to Christmas Eve.
The idea of recruiting outside players to self-mastery an internal investigation was moreover controversial, she added. Yet in the end, the group spoken in mid-January that former MEP Richard Corbett and Silvina Bacigalupo, a law professor and workbench member of Transparency International Spain, would lead a group-backed inquiry, which has now begun.
The moves towards to have staved off a rencontre to García’s leadership, and so far, attacks from the Socialists’ main rival, the EPP, have been limited. But S&D MEPs say there’s still an air of unease, with some concerned the wind-up hasn’t gone deep unbearable — while others itch to defend the accused.
Some party activists quietly question if the response was too fast and furious.
Arena’s political future is in doubt, for example, plane though she’s faced no criminal charges. Following mounting pressure well-nigh her ties to Panzeri, culminating with a POLITICO report on her undeclared travel to Qatar, Arena formally resigned from the human rights subcommittee. The group is not defending her, plane as some activists mourn the downfall of someone they see as a sincere champion for human rights causes.
Vocal sponsorship for Kaili has moreover fueled controversy: Italian S&D MEPs drew groans from colleagues when they hawked virtually a letter well-nigh the treatment of Kaili and her daughter, which only garnered 10 signatures.
“I do not believe it was necessary,” García said of the letter. “[If] I worry well-nigh the situation in jails, it has to be for everyone, not for a specific MEP.”
The letter moreover did nothing to warm relations between the S&D’s Spanish and Italian delegations, which have been frosty since surpassing the scandal. The S&D spokesperson in a statement rejected the notion that there are tensions withal geographical lines: “There’s no divide between North and South, nor East and West, and there’s no tension between the Italian and Spanish delegations.”
In flipside zany are MEPs who are looking somewhat suspiciously at their colleagues.
Repasi, the German S&D member, said he is weary of “colleagues that are seemingly lying into your face” — a specific reference to Tarabella, who vocally denied wrongdoing for weeks, only to have allegations surface that he took virtually 140,000 in bribes from Panzeri, the detained ex-lawmaker.
Repasi added: “It makes you increasingly and increasingly wonder if there is anyone else betting on the fact that he or she might not be caught.”
Jakob Hanke Vela, Karl Mathiesen and Aitor Hernández-Morales unsalaried reporting.