“Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future,” crowed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the most senior of the leaders at the really in the Spanish capital.
“We’re facing a global tipping point,” said France’s Marine Le Pen, while celebrating that, since Trump’s inauguration, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “has all but disappeared from the screens.”
The guests, mostly Vox’s most loyal supporters and political muscle from across Spain, descended on Madrid Airport’s Marriott Conference Center to fill a 2,000-seat auditorium, armed with their Dior scarfs and Barbour jackets. They came to listen to leaders including Orbán, Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Czechia’s Andrej Babiš and Austria’s Herbert Kickl, who joined via video link as he finalizes negotiations in Vienna to become Austria’s new chancellor.
One after the other, the leaders vowed to “reconquer” Europe’s governments from Socialist, liberal and center-right forces — building an explicit parallel to Spain’s “Reconquista,” when Christian kingdoms reconquered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rulers in the Middle Ages.
Following his landslide victory in Austria, Kickl argued that “people everywhere are rising against the impositions of the EU centralists and left-wing ideologies,” and promised a new model of European cooperation based on national sovereignty.
Green Deal and immigration
The leaders agreed the EU and the European Commission president are the source of Europe’s social and economic malaise.
