Europe's Far-right Parties Hold Coalition Talks

Europe's extremist anti-immigrant parties should unite in a new pan-European movement under the leadership of the Austrian politician Jörg Haider, a leading Belgian hardliner says in an interview published today.

Filip DeWinter, the leader of the extreme Flemish separatist party in Belgium, said moves were afoot to form a cross-border, extreme right grouping in the European parliament, pooling Mr Haider's Freedom party, France's National Front, his own Vlaams Belang, the Dutch New Right party, and Italy's Northern League.

The coalition should run on a single platform in the next European elections in 2009, Mr DeWinter told the Vienna weekly magazine, News.

Mr DeWinter, the head of the renamed Vlaams Blok which was branded a racist organisation last month by Belgium's supreme court and could have been banned had it not relabelled, said he had been discussing the move with Mr Haider.

"I've had several talks with Jörg Haider and have the feeling that he's interested in this cooperation," said Mr DeWinter. "I'm proposing to Jörg Haider that he be the top candidate of our movement."

One of Mr Haider's key lieutenants, Andreas Mölzer, had a meeting in Antwerp last week with likeminded figures from Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. Mr Mölzer, an early strategist behind Mr Haider's rise in Austria, is now an MEP for Mr Haider's Freedom party.

In recent years there have been repeated tentative attempts by the extreme right to link up at the European level, but they have come to very little.

Mr DeWinter said forces should now be joined to combat the "Islamisation of Europe".

Mr Haider is regarded as one of Europe's shrewdest and most successful extreme right leaders, taking more than a quarter of the national vote in 1999 and taking his party into government, triggering an EU boycott of Austria.

But in recent years his fortunes have declined steeply and he has been keeping a relatively low profile as governor of the southern province of Carinthia. Eager for the lime light, the Austrian may be attracted by the European stage.

Mr Mölzer said the merger of the nationalists was "a question of fate", pointing to parallel European associations of social democrats and liberals.