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France’s Rassemblement National is in talks to join a new group with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in the European parliament as far-right parties are jostling to convert their votes into power.

The RN, which is forecast to win the most seats in Sunday’s French legislative elections, will decide whether to ally with the Patriots for Europe group on Monday, three people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.

Orbán’s Patriots group on Saturday gained its seventh member party, meeting the threshold to form an official faction under the EU parliament’s rules.

If the RN joins with its 30 MEPs, the Patriots are likely to overtake the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) to become the third-largest group in parliament.

Vox, the Spanish hard-right party that counts six MEPs, quit ECR for the Patriots on Friday. The Freedom party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the Danish People’s party, which have seven MEPs between them, also said they would join the Patriots.

The ECR, dominated by Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, relegated the Renew group built around Emmanuel Macron’s centrists into fourth position last month, but has now dropped to 78 members. Renew has 76 members.

But the proliferation of right-wing groups also means their dreams of a super-merger that would wield significant power in the EU assembly appear to be over.

“Anything that furthers the interests of Patriots in the EU parliament is good for us. Orbán is a fine politician who has the skills to operate at the EU level,” said one RN official.

Zoltán Kóvacs, Orbán’s spokesman, told journalists to “stay alert in the next few days”.

Alternative for Germany leader Alice Weidel, whose MEPs were expelled from the outgoing Identity and Democracy group dominated by the RN, told the FT last week she was also seeking to form a group — potentially based on the remains of ID.

But it remains unclear whether the AfD will manage to secure MEPs from enough countries, given that four parties have now left ID for the Patriots.

Russia is the main dividing line between the Patriots and AfD on the one hand, and the ECR on the other. Meloni is a strong defender of Ukraine, while Orbán, Le Pen and Weidel have traditionally held more pro-Moscow views.

The Hungarian leader met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday, causing outcry among EU leaders who said he did not represent them, just after he made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday.

On Wednesday the Russian foreign ministry posted on social media what appeared to be a congratulatory message for the RN, featuring a photo of Le Pen celebrating her first-round victory.

“The people of France are seeking a sovereign foreign policy that serves their national interests and a break from the dictate of Washington and Brussels,” said the post. 

Le Pen, who has long tried to counter criticism that she is too pro-Russia, criticised the post on TF1 news on Thursday. “I absolutely do not feel responsible for Russian provocations towards France,” she said, adding it was “a form of interference”.  

However, Orbán said earlier this week he was confident the Patriots group would grow “faster than anyone thinks now” after the second round of the French elections.

“You will see . . . those who promised to join and create a pan-European faction, the third largest, then the second largest. Later we will attempt to be the largest but that won’t be this year.”

He will combine his group’s power in parliament with his country having just taken the six-month rotating presidency of the bloc, which allows his ministers to set the agenda of meetings.

The centre-right European People’s party is the largest in the 720-strong parliament with 188 members, followed by the centre-left Socialists and Democrats, with 136. Party size dictates how many coveted positions such as committee chairs and vice-presidents they get. 

However, MEPs still vote on the positions, and the pro-European majority, including Renew, the Greens and other parties, operates a “cordon sanitaire” to reject any far-right candidates. They also voted to divvy up committee chairmanships based on group size on July 4, before the Patriots are constituted.  

The ECR secured one committee chair and one vice-president during the last term because they came from its more moderate parties.

“No one beyond the cordon sanitaire can chair a committee,” senior Socialist MEP Alex Agius Saliba told the FT. 

But János Bóka, Hungary’s Europe minister, told journalists that there would be “an institutionally and politically strengthened right in the European parliament and in an ideal world, this should be reflected in the distribution of positions”.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Saturday granted former President Donald Trump’s request for further briefing on the issue of presidential immunity in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and delayed certain deadlines.

Cannon’s order marks the latest fallout from the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision on Monday, which ruled that Trump has immunity from prosecution for some conduct as president in the federal election interference case.

In the order, Cannon afforded special counsel Jack Smith the right, but not the obligation, to file a submission on the use of classified information at trial. At the same time, she paused two upcoming deadlines for Trump and his co-defendants.

Smith’s brief is now due on July 18, and a reply from Trump’s team is due on July 21.

Neither Trump’s lawyers nor the Department of Justice immediately responded to a request for comment Saturday afternoon.

There is no trial date in sight in the classified documents case. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The latest development comes after Trump’s attorneys on Friday asked Cannon to pause court proceedings and consider how the Supreme Court’s ruling affects the case. Trump’s team in February had also filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on immunity grounds.

Saturday’s order also makes Trump’s team busier — at least in the short term — as it attempts to minimize or outright dismiss two of the three other criminal cases pending against him.

Through an order earlier this week, Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s criminal hush money trial earlier this year, stayed Trump’s July 11 sentencing hearing to allow for briefing on Trump’s motion to set aside the verdict in that trial.

Trump’s brief, which is expected to focus on evidence involving his official acts admitted during the trial to prove his knowledge and intent, is due on July 11. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s response is due on July 24.

During her 2009 confirmation hearing before the US Senate, Sonia Sotomayor declared that the president “can’t act in violation of the constitution. No one is above the law”. 

Back then, she was answering a question about former president George W Bush’s application of a bill banning torture. Now, 15 years later, Sotomayor has once again raised this tenet as a Supreme Court justice, dissenting from an opinion that granted Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for his “official” acts as president.

“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote.

It is just one example this term of how Sotomayor, often joined by her two fellow liberals on the bench, has pushed back forcefully and vented frustrations about the court’s conservative majority, whose decisions have reshaped American government and society, from presidential immunity and abortion to regulators’ powers and gun policy. 

Sotomayor has been a pillar of the high court’s left-leaning wing since she joined the bench. She became the most senior liberal justice after Stephen Breyer’s retirement in 2022, emerging as the bench’s most vigorous standard-bearer of liberal views as the court has taken on increasingly polarising cases.

“She is now the strongest character” in the liberal camp, said Barbara Perry, Supreme Court and presidency scholar at the University of Virginia. “She has risen to this level . . .[and taken on] the title of the ‘great dissenter,’” akin to predecessors such as John Marshall Harlan, a one-time slave owner who later championed minority groups’ civil rights primarily via the dissents he wrote while on the court.

Sotomayor, the first Latina member of the Supreme Court, was raised by her single Puerto Rican mother in a Bronx housing project. She earned scholarships to Princeton University and Yale Law School before starting a legal career as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

George HW Bush, a Republican, in 1991 nominated her for a seat on the prestigious court for the Southern District of New York. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, then appointed her as an appellate judge, and when Supreme Court Justice David Souter retired, Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to replace him.

Since Sotomayor joined the bench, its balance of power has shifted. In the 2010s, it was often split 5-4 in liberals’ favour, when including Anthony Kennedy’s powerful swing vote. But Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments have solidified a six-justice conservative majority, emboldening its staunchest members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

As the conservatives’ power has grown they have also issued some of the court’s most dramatic rulings in recent years — including the 2022 reversal of Roe vs Wade, the decision that had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years. In many of those cases, the ideological divides in the court’s rulings have opened it up to accusations of partisanship.

Sotomayor has dissented from high-profile opinions, including upholding bans on homeless people sleeping in public and curbing universities’ consideration of race in admissions. Her writings have stood out for their scathing criticism and withering phrasing. “You can certainly see . . . the ideological force of Justice Sotomayor revealing itself in these dissents,” Perry said. 

She has also taken a front seat during oral arguments. While discussing the case that ultimately overturned Roe she wondered aloud whether the court could “survive the stench . . . in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts”.

And like other justices this term, she has from time to time given her dissents extra emphasis by reading them from the bench — a practice in revival that seeks to direct the public’s attention to high-stakes rulings.

She has not minced words in her writing. A decision to reverse a ban on “bump stocks”, a device to increase the firepower of rifles, would have “deadly consequences”, she wrote. In dissenting from the homelessness case, she said: “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.”

Sotomayor’s dissent in the presidential immunity case was perhaps her fiercest this term. She painted a grim picture of how the decision could allow a president to lead with impunity. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Her last sentence — “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” — broke from the standard conclusion: “I respectfully dissent.” That caught the attention of US President Joe Biden, who quoted Sotomayor hours after the ruling, saying: “So should the American people dissent.”

“It is not surprising that as the rightwing justices undermine democracy, the rule of law, and the modern administrative state, the justices who do not sign on to this project would begin to raise the alarm in more alarmist tones,” said Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Sotomayor, 70, is setting herself apart as she faces calls from some Democratic activists to step down in order to allow Biden to appoint a younger justice who could solidify the liberal wing in the face of a conservative supermajority, half of whom are not yet 60.

Calls for her retirement are symptomatic of Democrats’ anxiety around the odds of a Biden win in the 2024 general election in November, a rematch against Trump, and of holding on to the Senate, which is charged with confirming Supreme Court nominees.

Other members of the liberal wing have raised their rhetorical edge as conservatives have flexed their power in decisions that curbed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of its own in-house courts and lengthened the statute of limitations to challenge regulations, among others.

Justice Elena Kagan penned the dissent to a decision overturning Chevron vs Natural Resources Defense Council, a decades-old legal doctrine that has given the judiciary more power to determine how federal agencies should interpret ambiguous rules and laws written by Congress.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris . . . In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies,” Kagan wrote.

Not all decisions were split along ideological lines. Conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh at times joined their liberal colleagues in dissent. For instance, Coney Barrett authored the dissent in a case that limited the use of an obstruction charge featured in hundreds of prosecutions against rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6 2021.

She also wrote a concurring opinion in the presidential immunity case that challenged the notion that protected “official” acts may not be introduced as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a president for private activity.

“I see a streak of pragmatic independence that is not so much leaning towards liberality, but being more pragmatic in her conservative thinking than the more ideological, philosophical views of an Alito or a Thomas or maybe even a [Neil] Gorsuch,” Perry said.

The Supreme Court is set to hear more hot-button cases next term, beginning in October, including an appeal against a Texas law that requires age verification on pornography websites.

Sotomayor earlier this year told university audiences that she lives “in frustration” in the face of a conservative majority. There are “days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried . . . And there are likely to be more,” she said.

More contentious cases are bound to come the court’s way. But Sotomayor has not publicly suggested she is ready to quit. “You have to shed the tears, and then you have to wipe them and get up and fight some more,” she said.