Global right-wing leaders revel in a renewed fight, supercharged by Trump

Oxon Hill, Md. -- To long-standing US allies in Europe, remarks by President Donald Trump and Vice President J D Vance about Ukraine and Germany this month represented one of the gravest tests of the postwar order in decades.

But to a cohort of current and former world leaders who gathered this past week at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, they represented something else: the dawning of a global right-wing resurgence that, thanks to Trump's reelection, is on the cusp of irrevocably transforming that order.

"We missed the first American Revolution in 1776," said Liz Truss, a Conservative member of Parliament who briefly served as Britain's prime minister. "We want to be a part of the second American Revolution."

Truss was one of more than half a dozen political figures from as many countries to make the pilgrimage to CPAC this past week in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington. A long-running gathering of American conservatives that helped foment right-wing insurgencies within the GOP during the Tea Party and Trump eras, CPAC has in recent years taken these ambitions global. The conference now serves as a connector of right-wing political movements in the Americas, Europe and Asia that increasingly see themselves as allies in a linked struggle against the institutions and geopolitical norms that have dominated world affairs since World War II.

In the past two weeks, Trump and his top officials have questioned that order more directly and openly than any US administration of the postwar period.

Marco Rubio, Trump's secretary of state, met for more than four hours Tuesday with Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to reset the relationship between the two global powers and seek a path to end the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a "dictator" and blamed him for Russia's 2022 invasion of his country.

And the Riyadh meeting came days after Vance, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, likened the European Union's policing of online speech to Soviet censorship. He also met with the leader of Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany party, which had long been marginalized for some members' embrace of neo-Nazi slogans and for its links to a recent coup plot.

Vance defended his Munich speech at his own CPAC appearance Thursday, as did a parade of international allies who took the stage after him.

The standard-bearers of right-wing political movements around the world -- prime ministers from North Macedonia and Slovakia, opposition leaders from Poland and Spain -- welcomed Trump as a transformational figure in a battle against liberalism that transcended nations and continents.

They cast their domestic enemies -- judges, online speech constraints, civil society programs and mainstream news organizations -- as part of an international project to suppress traditional values, religion and free markets, and hailed the new US president as an ally in turning the tide against them.

"He's completely changing the international picture," Balázs Orbán, the political director for the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who is no relation, said in an interview at the conference.

In his speech Thursday, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a Brazilian lawmaker and a son of the country's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was charged this past week with attempting a coup to stay in power after losing the 2022 election, described his country as "a laboratory" that was "being used as a testing ground for the judicial weaponization against conservatives, libertarians and Christians -- always under the pretense of protecting democracy."

In particular, the foreign delegations at CPAC celebrated the effort being led by Elon Musk to eliminate the US Agency for International Development and the civil society programs it funds around the world.

Such programs have enjoyed broad bipartisan backing for years in the United States, and similar support in the European Union, which has joined the United States in financing independent news media, rule-of-law programs and, more recently, efforts to curb online misinformation around the world. But these efforts have incensed the ascendant right-wing parties, which have often run afoul of them.

Eduardo Bolsonaro, in his speech, accused USAID of "channeling resources into censorship, judicial overreach and political persecution."

Musk's abrupt embrace of these grievances against the U.S. development agency reflects the growing influence of the global right on the American right -- a connection commemorated at CPAC when President Javier Milei of Argentina, who has become a celebrity on the American right, bounded onstage to present Musk with a chain saw resembling the one he had wielded theatrically during his 2023 presidential campaign.

This year's CPAC was perhaps the fullest fruition yet of the vision of right-wing solidarity that some in Trump's political orbit, most notably his onetime White House adviser Steve Bannon, tried to foment during the first Trump administration.

Bannon, who spoke at CPAC on Thursday, threatened to fracture the coalition, however, raising his hand briefly at the end of his speech in what appeared to many to be a reference to a Nazi salute -- a gesture that recalled a similar salute by Musk at Trump's inauguration rally last month.

Bannon's gesture, which he denied was a Nazi reference, prompted Jordan Bardella, the leader of France's far-right National Rally party, to cancel his planned CPAC speech Friday. In a statement, he said he had made the decision "immediately" after seeing Bannon make a "gesture referring to Nazi ideology."

But another international speaker on the Friday program, Mexican actor and political activist Eduardo Verástegui, leaned into Bannon's provocation, raising his arm in a similar salute at the conclusion of his own speech.

Speaking on Thursday, British politician Nigel Farage, among the first from abroad to make connections with the right wing of the Republican Party in the Obama years, remarked on how far the right had come since.

"How amazing it is -- 13 years ago, I was the only foreign speaker" at CPAC, said Farage, who was a key figure in the Brexit campaign of 2016, an early victory in the global right-wing resurgence.

Other speakers had followed Farage's lead in crusading against the European Parliament and EU bureaucracy, which they cast as part of the global network of institutions biased against their movement.

"My government was punished for standing up to Brussels," said Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland from 2017 to 2023, when his right-wing Law and Justice Party was ousted from power by Civic Platform, a center-right party.

Balázs Orbán, the Hungarian official, whose government has been a model to many like-minded political activists in the global right, said right-wing political movements were less naturally predisposed to cooperate than liberal movements. But he argued that increasingly shared interests -- blocking immigration, centering Christianity in public life and skepticism of the war in Ukraine -- were drawing the disparate movements together.

"It's complicated, because if you are a national conservative, it means that you want the best for your country, and your country's national interests can be confrontational with other countries' national interests," he said. "But we still have to do it, try to identify the shared points -- and now there are many, many points."