Hungary’s Orban, allies announce push to unite Europe’s surging right-wing parties

On a day when France’s right-wing parties were hoping to score a historic electoral breakthrough, conservative European parties a few hundred miles away were announcing plans for an ambitious continent-wide union of forces.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán traveled Sunday to Vienna to meet with leaders of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party and the Czech Republic’s ANO Party and unveil the new “Patriots for Europe” alliance.

The three parties are inviting other far-right movements that have been gaining popularity in elections in recent years across the European Union to join them. Europe’s conservative populist surge has been hampered in the past by the failure of right-leaning ideological parties to operate together.

The move comes a day after Mr. Orban’s Hungary took over the six-month presidency of the European Union and on the same day that France holds parliamentary elections that polls suggest will produce major gains for the once-fringe far-right National Rally party.

Mr. Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party has been in power for more than a decade and has become a beacon of global conservatism for its willingness to challenge the power and policies of the European Union establishment in Brussels.

Mr. Orbán has also formed close ties to the U.S. conservative movement, befriending former President Donald Trump and hosting overseas meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. He has questioned support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and balked at times at harsh anti-Russia policies from the EU.

All three leaders also cited stricter rules on immigration and the need to curb the powers of the EU bureaucracy as key planks in their new platform.

“What Europeans want is three things: Peace, order and development,” Mr. Orbán told the Sunday gathering in Vienna, The Associated Press reported. “And what they are getting from the elite in Brussels today is war, migration and stagnation.”

Herbert Kickl, whose Freedom Party recently took in the most votes in Austria’s European Parliament elections last month, said all conservative parties across the EU would be invited to join the Patriots for Europe bloc when the new EU Parliament sits in Strasbourg July 16.

“This alliance is meant as a rocket that will bring other parties on board at the European level to join forces and give Europe a better future,” Mr. Kickl said.