Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and France’s Marine Le Pen headlined a rally in Madrid on Saturday by Europe’s biggest far-right bloc, buoyed by Donald Trump’s return to power and calling for “a 180-degree pivot”.
Patriots for Europe has realigned extreme-right forces in the European Union. It became the European Parliament’s third-largest force after Orban helped launch it last year to pull the bloc towards the far right.
“Yesterday we were the heretics. Today we are the mainstream… We are the future,” proclaimed Orban, sharing the stage with other leading extreme-right nationalists including Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and former Czech premier Andrej Babis.
I find it incredibly cringe anyway that all these parties just copy the same slogan. Some weird form of international nationalism, where they all just copy whatever the others are doing. It apparently works very well.
I guess in Western Europe it’s largely focused around anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments, but with this movement being more and more international, I do notice an uptick in rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and women’s rights, with a lot of anti science and elitism/wokeism sprinkled in. It’s very scary. I’m happy that we don’t have a political system where the winner takes it all in my country, as it’s pretty bad already as it is right now.