Europe's far-right leaders, including France's Marine Le Pen, on Saturday hailed the agenda of the American president Donald Trump claiming it presented the continent with a turning point.
Speaking in Madrid during an event organised by Spain’s Vox party under the banner "Make Europe Great Again”, Le Pen said that Trump's election triumph in November gave Europe a chance to change course.
"The election of Donald Trump cannot be analysed solely as a simple changeover in a democratic country," Le Pen said.
"Nor even just as the patriotic awakening of a nation that would rightly dismiss the forces of decline. We are facing a truly global tipping point."
She told around 2,000 delegates at the meeting that the EU had left the continent at the margins of technological revolutions in artificial intelligence and other realms.
Le Pen, whose National Rally party emerged from last July's elections as the third largest force in the Assemblée Nationale, said that it was the European leaders at the gathering via their Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, who had the best chance of communicating and working with Trump.
"Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, everyone understands that something has changed," she said. "The European Union seems to be in a state of stupefaction. We are the only ones that can talk with the new Trump administration,” Le Pen added.
Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, said: "The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks. Yesterday we were heretics, today we are the majority."
Tariffs
Italy's Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini and the Vox president Santiago Abascal downplayed Trump's threat to slap higher tariffs on European imports. They claimed that the EU's taxes and regulations were a bigger danger to Europe's prosperity.
“The great tariff is the Green Deal and the confiscatory taxes of Brussels and socialist governments across Europe,” said Abascal.
Salvini said German electors faced a historic opportunity when they vote on 23 February in a general election. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is running second in the polls behind the centre-right opposition leader Friedrich Merz.
“The engine of Europe has come to a halt in the face of the most disastrous government of the post-war period," Salvini said of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's administration.
During the opening sessions of the two-day event, each of the speakers touched on the defence of Europe's borders against illegal immigration.
Last month, data collected by the bloc’s border control agency Frontex, showed that irregular border crossings into the EU fell 38 percent in 2024 to 239,000 – the lowest number registered since 2021 when migration plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spain's ruling Socialist Party described the meeting as a clan of ultras. A statement added: "They will not succeed in making their black-and-white vision of the world prevail in this country."
Despite the Patriots' aim of uniting Europe's nationalist conservatives, some of the EU's most influential groups such as the Italian Brothers of the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni , the AfD and Poland's Law and Justice party have refused to join them.
