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.
Although I think Patriot is such a loaded, dangerous word and would usually doubt there is ever an appropriate time for actual grown-ups to use it, I think I have found one use-case: it would be interesting to form a pan-European collective of actually sane, grown-up, people-before-money leaning Europeans (i.e. not the emotionally stunted, tribalism-fuelled morons obsessed with the accumulation of trinkets and perpetuation of endless persecution sprees in service of their hate/anger/stress-based adrenaline & cortisol addictions), and call that new collective “Actual Patriots for Actual Europe”. Then just sit back with popcorn and watch the pompous outrage chain-reaction from the PfE kiddies unfold in realtime.