When it comes to electoral victory, Dutch right-wing MP Marcel de Graaff has a particularly bad record: he lost 71 percent of the votes he cast.
De Graaff was also not keen on other parliamentary work: he did not table any amendments during the 9th legislature.
The 62-year-old Dutchman is a curious case of parliamentary politics. He was an MEP in the last term, from 2014 to 2019, but narrowly failed to regain his seat as the top candidate for Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party. He finally returned to Parliament in 2020 after the redistribution of seats in the European Parliament due to the departure of British MPs. De Graaff then left Wilders’ party to join the Dutch Eurosceptic Forum for Democracy party.
Beyond the loss of votes, De Graaff gained notoriety for his full support of Russian Vladimir Putin’s public support in his war against Ukraine.
He has appeared as a frequent guest on the Voice of Europe media outlet, which was denounced last month as a pro-Russian propaganda channel by Czech and Belgian security services. De Graaff, in videos for Voice of Europe, said he hoped “Ukrainian civilization will lose.” Before that, the far-right group Identity and Democracy suspended De Graaff over pro-Russian tweets about the 2022 Ukraine war.
Finalists: Second on our list of losers is Czech MEP Hynek Blaško, from the nationalist and Eurosceptic Alliance of National Forces party. Blaško voted against the majority in 60 percent of cases. Blaško is also not enthusiastic about parliamentary work like amendments, having only tabled four since taking office in 2019.
At the party level, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s far-right party, tops the ranking of losing votes. Eight of the ten lawmakers who lost the most votes were members of the AfD. The party’s favorite for the upcoming elections, Maximilian Krah – who was also implicated in the influence scandal surrounding Voice of Europe – is in 11th place.
What they say: De Graaff did not respond to a request for comment. German AfD MP Bernhard Zimniok said that what the European Commission and other members of the European Parliament cook up is usually “purely ideological in nature” and that voting against it “is not just common sense but the duty of every democratically elected MEP acting in the interest of the European Parliament. people.”
Fun fact: De Graaff attempted to launch a campaign for a seat in the next term of the European Parliament – not in the Netherlands, but rather in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, Belgium. However, his party, the Forum for Democracy, failed to gather enough signatures to run in Belgium’s European elections.
Chances of being re-elected: The list led by de Graaff did not obtain enough signatures to stand in the elections.
—Louise Guillot
Politices
