The leaders of Europe’s far-right parties, including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, travelled to Budapest on Monday 23 March to support their Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán, in his re-election campaign, which has been marked by renewed attacks on the European Union and Ukraine.
“We want an alliance of sovereign, proud European nations. We do not want a closer Union, nor a federation”, declared Mr Orbán at a meeting on the sidelines of the CPAC assembly of patriotic movements. He condemned the “stalemate” in a Europe paralysed by the economic, migration and energy crises. And he accused “the ‘left in Brussels’ [of wanting] to incorporate Ukraine into the EU through a fast-track accession procedure”.
In a proclamation adopted in Budapest, the far-right political movements claim to be “the last line of defence” against the creation of a centralising “superstate“ in Brussels that would seize new powers through “silent coups”.
The European Patriots reject the end of unanimous decision-making by Member States at EU level and criticise using rule of law as “a political weapon directed against democratically elected governments”. They support the freedom of states to maintain their traditions based on Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and call for the rejection of all “mass immigration”.
See the Patriots’ Budapest Proclamation: https://aeur.eu/f/laz (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)