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.
And the “rest of the world is devastated from the war, so there is no competition anywhere”.