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The email landed on Tuesday morning in the mailboxes of the members of the CDU and CSU in the European Parliament.
"Call for signature," was the subject line.
And further: “Formal demand to exclude Tamás Deutsch from the EPP group.” The MEPs from the CDU and CSU are part of the conservative EPP group, the largest group in the European Parliament.
The sender of the appeal was Othmar Karas;
one of the Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament.
The Austrian MP from the ÖVP had attached a letter in which he called for the Hungarian Fidesz MP Deutsch to be excluded from the conservative EPP group.
"According to the procedural rules of the EPP group, individual exclusions are possible by voting in group meetings," he wrote.
The attached letter, which the other EPP MEPs should sign, is addressed to the parliamentary group president Manfred Weber (CSU), the general secretary of the group Simon Busuttil and all members of the group.
"We demand that Tamás Deutsch be excluded from the EPP group," it says.
"We ask for a formal vote on his exclusion at the next group meeting on December 9th."
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The blockade policy of Poland and Hungary has thus finally also reached the conservative party family.
The two Central European states are currently blocking the legislation for the upcoming EU long-term budget (MFF) and corona aid because they want to prevent Brussels from cutting EU funds in the future if member states violate constitutional principles such as the independence of the courts, freedom of the press or the protection of minorities.
The reason for Karas' collection of signatures is a verbal failure by Fidesz founding member Deutsch to speak to Manfred Weber.
In response to the blockade taken by Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Poland's strongest man, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczynski, Weber had declared that his group and the European Parliament would continue to support the rule of law.
"The EU Parliament will not shrink a millimeter," said Weber.
As a result, Fidesz politician Deutsch had stated in interviews that parliamentary group leader Weber reminded him of the Gestapo and the former Hungarian state security authority Ávo, when he said that if you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to fear from the rule of law mechanism.
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Weber himself did not react to the Nazi comparison, but the EPP gave a flagrant protest.
The reaction was also so strong because leading EPP politicians like Chairman Donald Tusk or Karas have long tried to exclude the right-wing populist Hungarian Fidesz party from the conservative party family.
Whether there will be an exclusion will not be decided until next year: The tip of the scales is the largest group member, the CDU, and how the party's MPs position themselves on the Fidesz exclusion will also depend on its new chairman.
So far there is no majority in favor of expelling the party;
therefore it is also questionable whether Karas can collect the necessary majority of votes for his push to exclude German.