The meeting between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on November 7 was more than a routine encounter between two right-wing leaders. It signaled the potential emergence of a wider geopolitical change and the rise of a political philosophy long dismissed by Brussels elites and Western media as ‘populism,’ but in truth is the last bulwark against Europe’s civilizational decline.
“President Trump stood up for Hungary; this hasn’t happened in a long time,” Orbán declared after securing a comprehensive exemption from U.S. sanctions on Russian energy imports. The victory was not just monetary but also deeply symbolic. The leader of the world’s most powerful nation treated the prime minister of a small Central European country with genuine respect rather than condescension. Trump hailed Orbán as a “great leader” and extolled his response to immigration as exemplary and a model for the rest of Europe.
Orbán’s triumph in Washington is yet another manifestation of a broader phenomenon: the emergence of an international coalition of patriots that is steadily reshaping European politics. The Patriots for Europe alliance, launched on June 30, 2024, in Vienna alongside Austria’s Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl and former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, rapidly became the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament. By July 2024, the Patriots group commanded 84 seats across 12 countries—a political force that Orbán correctly predicted would “very quickly become the biggest faction of the European right.”