LONDON — The “Make America Great Again” roadshow arrived in Europe this week with events in two nations where American conservatives see prime opportunities for a new transatlantic political culture — one molded by President Donald Trump’s right-wing populism and imbued with grand “clash of civilizations” rhetoric.
The Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — opened its week of European events on Tuesday in Jasionka, Poland, where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was among the speakers, urging Poles to vote for right-wing presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki in this weekend’s runoff election.
Noem eschewed the diplomatic norm of non-alignment in elections in allied nations, as have other administration officials including Vice President JD Vance. “You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values,” she told attendees in Jasionka.
“We need you to elect the right leader,” Noem said, dismissing Nawrocki’s rival — liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski — as “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”
“Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity that you have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” Noem said.
CPAC’s next stop will be in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, hosted by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a totem of the European anti-establishment right wing who has long enjoyed cozy relations with Trump.
Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, said Orban is positioning himself as “another recipient of the MAGA soft power export.”
“Orban is still positioning himself as someone who is exporting his campaign tactics, who can help others in terms of campaign consultancy and provide help from the United States,” Kreko said. “He’s trading off of his good partnership with Donald Trump.”
On the web page promoting CPAC’s Hungary event, the organization hit out at “corrupt elites” who it said “betray all that once made us great: patriotic virtue has been replaced by internationalism, common sense by bureaucracy and tradition by woke madness.”
“People on both sides of the Atlantic have risen up against this repackaged version of socialism, but success can only be complete when the tides of change converge and the age of patriotism begins at both poles of the West,” CPAC wrote.
Internationalism is front and center in the CPAC event agendas. Among the speakers in Budapest will be American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Yair Netanyahu — the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Also attending will be a host of other European conservative politicians from Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, France, Estonia and Greece — among others.
“With the triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of the European Right, the Age of the Patriots of Western Civilization has begun — CPAC Hungary 2025 will be the hub of this movement,” the organizing website said.
But the CPAC events come at a moment of peril for transatlantic relations. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to touch off a costly trade war with the European Union.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the bloc. “Now we’re going to charge the European Union,” Trump said when unveiling his tariff plans in April. “They’re very tough. Very, very tough traders. You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”
Trump announced last weekend that his planned 50% tariffs on EU goods would be delayed into July. But the bloc remains on a collision course with the Trump administration.
The economic and political aspirations of all EU leaders rely heavily on the bloc’s own fortunes, even for those populist leaders like Orban who so often define themselves in opposition to the grand European project.
The president’s European offensive could yet sour budding ties between the MAGA movement and its foreign allies, if the latter’s “core interests appear directly threatened by Trumpism,” Celia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office, told ABC News.
Kati Piri, Hungarian-born member of the Dutch parliament and the Labour Party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, migration and asylum, told ABC News in a statement that “Trump’s unilateralist policies are designed to hurt all Europeans, and that so-called allies will not be spared.”
“Trump’s continued threats of tariffs on EU products and global trade wars are making him an unpopular friend to have — and this is fragmenting the unity of the global right,” Piri suggested.
The glitz and glamour of CPAC’s Budapest event will be welcome for Orban, Kreko said, as the prime minister grapples with his own domestic challenges — not least the meteoric rise of liberal opposition leader Peter Magyar.
Around 10,000 people rallied in Budapest earlier this month to protest government plans to restrict the rights of independent media organizations — the latest in a wave of large protests against Orban and his Fidesz party government.
Kreko said Orban’s popularity is flagging after 15 years of uninterrupted power, even as he positions himself at the forefront of the nascent right-wing “illiberal international.”
“Orban is nowhere as popular as he was, let’s say in 2022, when he won the last elections,” Kreko said. “His popularity is waning, he is having a hard time getting it back and he also uses increasingly authoritarian tools to be able to keep power.”
“He has a hard time at home persuading his own constituency that the regime he is promoting all over the world is as powerful, as beautiful, as successful as it is seen by the MAGA camp in the United States,” Kreko added.
Trump’s America has become the center of gravity of the global right-wing movement — with the weight of the federal government and the broader national conservative movement behind it.
This week Samuel Samson — a senior advisor for the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — gave an indication of the prevailing winds in American transatlantic policy, publishing an article setting out “the need for civilizational allies in Europe.”
Claiming the existence of “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself,” Samson accused European governments of having “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Opening the CPAC event in Poland on Tuesday, chairman Matt Schlapp told attendees, “The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.”
That is why, he said, it was important to “win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere.”
For now, Kreko suggested the transatlantic MAGA project is incomplete, as did recent election results in Romania, Portugal and the first round of Poland’s presidential vote in which conservative and far-right candidates did not win power.
“What is common between Trump, Orban and many others in central and eastern Europe is that they really want to build this illiberal international,” Kreko said.
“But at the same time, we also have to be careful about overestimating its impact,” he said.
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