Euro far-right secretary gets front row seat at Castille victory bash

Former Labour candidate Sharon Ellul Bonici was in Castille on Monday, enjoying the views of the adulating crowd that came to greet Prime Minister Joseph Muscat after he took the oath of office for the second time

The right view: inside the Auberge de Castille, where EAF secretary-general Sharon Ellul Bonici celebrated Labour’s victory (Photo: Facebook)
The right view: inside the Auberge de Castille, where EAF secretary-general Sharon Ellul Bonici celebrated Labour’s victory (Photo: Facebook)

In October, Sharon Ellul Bonici flew the flag of the European Alliance for Freedom at a demonstration in Warsaw, standing shoulder to shoulder with right-wing MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke, the bow-tie wearing chauvinist who told Brussels that women were “smaller, weaker and less intelligent” and should not be paid as much as men.

As secretary-general of the EAF, a European party that until recently grouped together most far-right MEPs, Ellul Bonici remains active on the fringe of eurosceptic politics.

But on Monday, the 46-year-old former Labour candidate was in Castille, enjoying the views of the adulating crowd that came to greet Prime Minister Joseph Muscat after he took the oath of office for the second time. She was also on the stage at Labour’s last mass meeting in Hal Far on Thursday last week. 

It is jarring to consider that one of Europe’s most successful social-democrat parties is so carefree about hosting a far-right activist with strong links to politicians hostile to the European Union like Marine le Pen.

But Ellul Bonici, who was also granted backstage access at Labour’s final Hal Far mass meeting, is the sister of Labour candidate Andy Ellul, and she has a long relationship with Labour. In 2002, she campaigned against EU membership with the Campaign for National Independence and No2EU, when Labour was then against EU accession. In 2009, when Joseph Muscat – who left his MEP’s post to become Labour leader – reversed Labour’s anti-EU agenda, she was allowed to run on a Labour ticket in the European elections, even though she had served as vice-president of the now-defunct eurosceptic party EUDemocrats, which she founded with Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde.

Her drift to the right took her further closer to politicians like the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who up until 2014 joined forces to create the European Alliance for Freedom pan-European party.

Ellul Bonici speaks on the dangers of the EU in a Polish rally in October 2016 with MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke
Ellul Bonici speaks on the dangers of the EU in a Polish rally in October 2016 with MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke

As secretary-general, Ellul Bonici registered the EAF at the Maltese offices of a Birkirkara notary and the grouping also is registered as a Maltese NGO. 

In 2014, the party brought together far-right leaders such as Italy’s Lega Nord’s Matteo Salvini and Austria’s Freedom Party’s Franz Obermayr, who is the EAF’s president.

However, when the EAF failed to secure a minimum 25 MEPs from seven EU member states, its member MEPs had to start off the 2014 parliamentary term as ‘non-inscrits’. Le Pen and Wilders were unable to convince UKIP’s Nigel Farage and other conservatives to join.

The EAF died a silent death, although it still exists as a legal entity, and has been succeeded by another far-right European party, the Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom, without Wilders’s PVV because it does not want to take European funds. So the MENL is just the Front National, the FPÖ, and Lega Nord.

Nothing could be more contradictory than the views of Labour’s current leadership and those of Ellul Bonici’s EAF. Labour leader Joseph Muscat recently said his vision is to have a more cosmopolitan society in Malta. In Warsaw recently, Ellul Bonici stood by the side of Korwin-Mikke during the ‘Freedom March’ where he called out to attendees to “stop the Islamic invasion and save Europe from being led to catastrophe by EU socialists”.

Ellul Bonici’s husband Kevin Ellul-Bonici also worked for UKIP in Brussels, but in 2015 he was linked to the ‘Red Dalia’ scandal, when controversial biographies of Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė were left in the pigeon-holes of MEPs in an attempt to smear her reputation.