The Fest in Budapest: How Conservative Conferences in Hungary Have Created An Authoritarian American-European Alliance
If you want to trace how the conservative movement and the Republican Party have evolved over time, one of the best places to look is the annual conferences of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC). CPAC first began inviting their counterparts from conservative and right-wing European parties in 2014. At first, CPAC did not emphasize far-right anti-immigrant parties, but instead the foreign politicians they invited in 2014 (Daniel Hannan of the Euroskeptic wing of the UK Conservative Party and Anna Fotyga of Poland’s Law and Jusice Party) emphasized reducing the power of the European Union instead of attacking immigrants.
This changed by 2015, when the only foreign politician invited to the CPAC conference was Nigel Farage, the leader of UK’s far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP). Farage favored eliminating at least 90% of yearly immigration to the United States, but when he spoke at CPAC in 2015, he got a negative reception, because instead of talking about immigration, he devoted more of his speech to criticizing America’s military activities in the Middle East, in a manner similar to Ron Paul’s right-wing anti-interventionist views. On the other hand, Farage used his experience in the UKIP in breaking off from the UK Conservative Party to argue that the CPAC attendees could also successfully challenge the US Republican Party from the right. Farage was extremely prescient in making this argument, but CPAC attendees would not realize how prescient he was until Donald Trump began taking over the GOP.
In 2016, CPAC was more focused on the primary race for the Republican nomination for the presidency, which probably explains why no non-American speakers were on the agenda that year. However, Nigel Farage continued to be important in influencing American conservatives, especially when he first appeared at a Donald Trump rally in Mississippi in August of that year. Farage originally ended up in Mississippi when an aide to Governor Phil Bryant issued him an official invitation to visit the state. Farage had originally been scheduled only to appear at a GOP luncheon, followed by a private fundraising dinner in the evening, but because Donald Trump was in town, Trump eventually ended up inviting Farage to speak in front of one of his rallies attended by 15,000 people. Farage didn’t technically endorse Trump then, but when he said from the stage, “If I were an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me,” he was hailed by the crowd like a rock star. It was the first time that a British politician had ever address a Republican rally in the United States.
When Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, his first contact with a UK politician was with Nigel Farage, not with Prime Minister Theresa May of the UK Conservative Party. Trump was already abandoning the traditional European conservative parties for the more extreme anti-immigrant parties on their right flank. The speakers’ lists at the CPAC conferences reflected this change, when they invited Farage back to the conference in 2017 and 2018.
In his 2017 speech, Farage referred to German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s humanitarian policy of opening up her country to Syrian refugees as “absolute madness and idiocy” and argued that, when Trump won in 2016, it represented “the year that the nation state democracy made a comeback against the globalists.” In the 2017 speech, Farage was gloating about Trump’s victory, but in his 2018 speech, he was more combative, after he had been named as a “person of interest” by the FBI in their investigation of Donald Trump’s contacts with Vladimir Putin. In the 2018 speech, he accused George Soros and his Open Society Forum of spending millions of dollars to disrupt elections worldwide for the sake of a hidden agenda to destroy the nation-state, a claim reminiscent of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have targeted Soros in the past.
Another foreign speaker at the 2018 CPAC conference was Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Maréchal-Le Pen is the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, an anti-Semitic far-right French politician who cofounded France’s National Front Party with Nazi collaborationist Francois Brigneau. When Jean-Marie’s daughter and Marion’s aunt, Marine Le Pen, took over leadership of the National Front from her aging father, she tried to soften the extremist image of the National Front Party by downplaying Catholic social conservatism and renaming the party as National Rally, because National Front was already tarnished as the name of an extremist UK political party of racist skinheads. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, on the other hand, is much more right-wing than her aunt Marine, and used her CPAC speech to argue that “40 years of massive immigration” had forced France into “the process of passing from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the littlest of Islam.”
CPAC also began building ties with far-right parties in Eastern Europe after inviting Miklos Szantho. When Szantho spoke at CPAC in 2022, he gave a conspiracy-themed speech denouncing “George Soros whose witchcraft practices should not be exposed to you.” As a member of Fidesz, the party behind Viktor Orban’s autocratic government in Hungary, Szantho referred to Orban’s opponents as “Bolsheviks of cancel culture,” an attempt to tie Hungarian autocracy to anti-woke campaigns in the U.S. Eventually, Szantho became the leader of CPAC Hungary, the first attempt to bring CPAC’s right-wing conferences to a foreign country.
By locating a CPAC conference in Hungary, Szantho enabled Republican politicians and activists to travel to Europe and develop even more ties with their far-right extremist counterparts overseas. At the 2022 CPAC Hungary conference in Budapest, the Republicans in attendance could meet with several extremist European parties, including Hungary’s autocratic Fidesz Party, Italy’s pro-Mussolini Lega, Spain’s anti-Muslim Vox, France’s anti-immigrant National Rally, Nigel Farage’s UKIP, and the Freedom Party of Austria, which was founded by a former Nazi SS officer. Donald Trump did not attend, but recorded a video giving his blessing to the conference. Tucker Carlson also recorded a video praising the conference for establishing a “no-woke zone.” Americans who spoke at the Budapest conference in person included former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum and Kanye West’s partner in anti-Semitism, Candace Owens.
The 2022 conference in Budapest proved to be successful enough for CPAC that they replicated it in 2023 and 2024. After Donald Trump recorded a video for the conference in 2022, additional GOP politicians began to follow suit, including U.S. Senator from Tennessee Marsha Blackburn, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Just like in 2022, Republican attendees in 2023 could interact with members of far-right European parties such as Fidesz, Lega, Vox, National Rally, and the Freedom Party of Austria. Americans who went to Budapest in person included Matt Whitaker, the acting attorney general who conspired with Trump’s January 6th coup, Arizona Senate candidate and election denier Kari Lake, and Gavin Wax of the alt-right-affiliated New York Young Republican Club. Non-American speakers included Viktor Orban, Tom Van Grieken of the extremist Vlaams Belang Party of Belgium, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of attempted would-be Brazilian dictator, Jair Bolsonaro.
In 2024, the organizers of the CPAC Hungary conference called themselves Wokebusters, an attempt to harness the U.S. culture war to an authoritarian endgame. Signatories to the Wokebusters task force included two Republican members of Congress, Paul Gosar and Andy Harris, but they also included Dutch anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders and Jack Posobiec, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist responsible for propagating the Pizzagate hoax. Other lesser known figures who signed the Wokebusters petition included Martin Helme, an Estonian politician who flashed a white power symbol at his inauguration, and Jose Antonio Kast, a right-wing Chilean politician who is the son of a Nazi Party member who fled the denazification of Germany. The conservatism that CPAC has embraced, due to the influence of Donald Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party, is not a mild conservatism of stability and tax cuts, but an increasingly white nationalist conservatism aimed attacking anybody labeled as a “foreigner.”