Patriots.eu has taken the European Parliament to court over its refusal to pay for an anti-Green Deal poster campaign in the Czech Republic.
The posters carried Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini alongside a politician from Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), a Czech party then in the same European family. Judges in Luxembourg heard the case on September 29, with the Parliament fielding 12 representatives against one lawyer and one administrator for the party.
At issue is €228,776.71 that the Parliament’s Bureau refuses to treat as eligible expenditure, paid to the contractor that displayed the posters.
The campaign ran in 2023, when the European party behind the Patriots for Europe group was still the Identity and Democracy Party (ID).
The Bureau concluded that European party money had in practice gone to help a national party. It found the European logo too small and said that, because the campaign ran only in the Czech Republic, voters could read it as domestic propaganda.
Patriots.eu rejects that reading. It argues the Green Deal is unmistakably an EU policy, that the European party’s identity appeared on the posters and that other political families have run comparable campaigns without the same consequences.
Its comparison is Renew Europe Now, the 2024 election campaign of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and the European Democratic Party. The party said that branding was closely tied to the Parliament’s Renew Europe group and to national parties in the same liberal family.
If a national politician on a poster turns a European campaign into indirect funding of a domestic party, it argued, the test should apply to every family in the chamber.
The party also disputes how the decision was reached. It said a letter from its financial adviser challenging a refusal to reimburse more than €250,000 cited comparable cases, but that relevant passages were redacted before the Bureau saw them.
A request to address the Bureau in person did not succeed, which the Parliament attributed to scheduling. Its lawyers called the process arbitrary and questioned whether objective criteria existed for when a European party’s activity becomes indirect support for a national one.
The Parliament denies the accusations and says its financial services apply budget rules intended to stop grants to European parties paying for national campaigns.
The party won a separate case on September 10, 2025, when the General Court annulled a fine of €47,020.54 imposed by the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF). The APPF appealed to the Court of Justice and that case remains open.
A ruling would set out how far European parties can fund campaigns in member states before the money counts as indirect aid to national partners.
