“My feeling is that the burden [of paperwork] is really to discourage you,” the person said.

Both parties were formed in the wake of June’s European election. Such EU-wide votes always result in a shifting of the political landscape and this time was no exception.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party started the ESN not long after being kicked out of the Identity and Democracy group (ID) because of the extreme views of its leading MEP, Maximilian Krah. After the election, ID fractured into two new far-right groups, Patriots for Europe (home to MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz) and the ESN. Now, AfD is trying to register the ESN as a political party too.

Meanwhile on the left, a number of parties, frustrated at how the Party of the European Left operates, jumped ship and started the ELA.

In EU-speak, European political parties — sometimes known as Europarties — are associations of like-minded national parties, and their function is to coordinate at the EU level as well as to organize electoral campaigns. Political groups, meanwhile, are sets of MEPs who sit together in the European Parliament.

The next step for the ESN and ELA was to apply to the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF), an obscure EU body that regulates who can and cannot be a political party, and what can and cannot be done with their money.