site.btaVazrazhdane Leader after Italy Forum of Identity and Democracy Group: EU Membership Terms Need to Be Revisited, How EU Functions Needs to Change

In a post on his social media a day after he delivered the opened address at a Florence meeting of the nationalist, right-wing, populist and eurosceptic Identity and Democracy group in the EP  Vazrazhdane leader Kostadin Kostadinov wrote that the EU membership conditions needs to be renegotiated, along with the very functioning of the EU, “or else its future is doomed amid exit referendums”.

Kostadinov was in Florence at the invitation of Mateo Salvini, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League. 

According to Kostadinov’s own summary of the speech, it said that the EU is the biggest threat to European civilization and that the conditions for membership and how the Union functions need to be revisited. The speech drew loud applause from the delegates at the meeting.

Kostadinov also wrote on social media that his party “will set in place a new model of relations: we will work with allies who respect us and not with masters who despise us, and will do away with the disgraceful image of Bulgarians who would agree with anything”. 

A dispatch from the forum by Italian news agency ANSA sums up the addresses by the party leaders:

From the leaders present came inevitable homage to the host, greeted several times with the appellation 'captain,' now forgotten in Italy. Then came old-fashioned slogans and pickaxes against Europe and beyond. From Bulgarian leader Kostadin Kostadinov ("Today the EU is a threat to Europe," he sentenced, threatening "a series of referendums to leave the EU") to German Tino Chrupalla, president of AfD (the new Europe is a house "with a garden for children and a wall against undesirables", while Ukraine "cannot win this war") to Poland's Roman Fritz (who revived key words like "God, honor, homeland, family, truth, justice and freedom" and the war on political correctness"). Concepts that Salvini listens to but from which, in his final speech on stage, he seems to distance himself.