Patriots Denounce Brussels' Self-Awarded Order of Merit

Strasbourg, 20/05/2026 - The Patriots for Europe group denounces today's conferral of the so-called "European Order of Merit", a distinction Brussels invented to decorate itself and which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen personally pinned on the chests of the laureates.

The Order was never debated and never voted in plenary. It was decreed by the Bureau in May 2025, which also appointed the selection committee and drew up the list of recipients. Honouring public service is a prerogative of Member States, not of an unelected body in Strasbourg handing medals, among others, to some of those whose political actions have led us into the current impasse.

The Patriots group did not wish to lend its support, through its presence, to this exercise in self-congratulation at a time when the damaging effects of European policies are being felt across every sector of the economy and by citizens throughout the continent.

When Patriots MEPs left the chamber in protest, the President of the Parliament suspended the sitting and ordered the doors thrown open so that anyone could occupy the empty seats. Staff and visitors were ushered in to fill the rows vacated by elected representatives, so that the cameras would broadcast images of a full hemicycle to European televisions. The seats of absent MEPs were dressed with extras to fake a consensus that does not exist, in the purest style of the propaganda regimes the EU was once supposed to stand against.

If a medal were truly to be awarded for European merit, it should go to the farmers ruined by the Green Deal, to the workers crushed by energy prices, to the families who can no longer afford a home, to the fishermen pushed out of their own waters, and to the small businesses buried under Brussels regulation. They are the ones bearing the consequences of the policies designed in these buildings. They are the Europe that deserves recognition, not the club that designed the award for itself.