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The far right is reorganizing to compete with the European People's Party (EPP), the conservative formation that has dominated the community scene for two decades.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who left the EPP in March due to discrepancies with his political line, held a mini-summit in Budapest on Thursday to start an offensive against his former co-religionists.
The meeting was attended by the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, representative of the ultra-conservative PiS party, and the Italian Matteo Salvini, leader of the ultra-nationalist League.
The stated goal of the meeting is to launch a political platform to offer an option much further to the right of the EPP and more in line with Donald Trump-style populism.
The three leaders meeting in Budapest have presented this appointment of Holy Thursday as the beginning of "a resurrection" of conservative values that, according to them, have been abandoned by the EPP.
"The PPE stopped working with us, that says it all by itself," Orbán said in a press conference after the meeting.
The Hungarian Prime Minister has assured that "the Christian Democrats in Europe have no representatives."
And with the new alliance, he added, "we want to represent them, we want them to have a voice in the EU."
The new platform would in principle revolve around Liga, PiS and Fidesz, Orbán's party.
But the intention is to attract groups from other countries to form a political fan that would agglutinate the ultra-conservative, xenophobic or Eurosceptic positions that squeak with the Christian Democratic tradition of the EPP.
"Today is the beginning of a process that will go through Europe to add new formations to our group," said Salvini.
The ultra-conservative axis hopes to meet again in May in Rome or Budapest to promote the new platform.
The sum of formations that are now scattered in the European Parliament could form a new group that would aspire to be the third largest in the chamber, taking that position away from the liberals.
For Salvini, the objective of the new alliance must be "for the European people to come out of one of its darkest periods and to place hope, family, work, rights and freedoms at the center",
But the fit of parties that are characterized by their ultra-nationalism and their lack of willingness to collaborate across borders is not easy.
Donald Trump's former ally, Steve Bannon, has already tried to create a kind of populist international to compete in the 2019 European Parliament elections and extend to the Old Continent the conservative involution that had reached the White House the year before.
But Bannon's movement failed, among other things, due to differences between leaders such as Salvini or the French Marine Le Pen.
The European elections, moreover, eroded the power of the two great political families (popular and socialist) but did not give sufficient force to the extreme right to set the agenda in the European Parliament.
The essential wild card role went to the Liberals, grouped under the name Renew around the movement of French President Emmanuel Macron.
The pandemic and Trump's electoral defeat have further eroded the position of the far right, with an electoral turn in several countries towards traditional positions of the right or left.
Salvini and Le Pen have even renounced or softened the rhetoric against the EU and the euro to focus their message on a recovery of supposedly lost conservative essences.
"We want more Europe," Salvini proclaimed in Budapest, "but a Europe that defends its borders."
Orbán is now trying to lead or, at least promote, that neo-conservative current after being forced to leave the EPP, the political family where he has been able to rub shoulders for years with Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, Mariano Rajoy or Ursula von der Leyen.
The Hungarian's party has remained for the moment in the European Parliament in the group of unregistered, a no man's land in which it loses practically all influence.
Fidesz needs the support of formations from larger countries, such as Poland or Italy, to gain some muscle in the European Parliament and to remain a reference of the right in the EU, especially in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
"We are going to launch a platform, an organization, a process, which will give citizens who believe in a traditional Europe the representation they deserve," said the Hungarian Prime Minister before meeting with Salvini and Morawiecki.
Orbán's party has 13 MEPs in the European Parliament and Salvini's party with 27. The Poles of the PIS have 25 seats but, above all, they dominate the parliamentary group ECR (Conservatives and Reformists), created in its day together with the Conservatives British by David Cameron and in which Vox now plays.
The popular Europeans force Orbán to withdraw his deputies from the parliamentary group
The PPE and Orbán
ECR has a total of 62 MEPs.
But a possible alliance with Orbán and Salvini could take him over a hundred and even get closer to the second group in the chamber, the Socialists (with 145 seats).
The appearance of this large ultra-conservative family would be especially dangerous for the EPP, which could lose the hegemony of the conservative vote.
That fear was one of the reasons for prolonging the coexistence with Orbán and tolerating his authoritarian drifts despite the fact that, according to the European Commission, they violated some of the fundamental principles of the EU, such as judicial independence, freedom of expression or rejection of any discrimination.
The sum, however, is not easy.
The Polish PiS, for example, misunderstands the proximity of Orbán and Salvini with the Kremlin, considered by Warsaw as the main enemy.
Marine Le Pen's party (Rassemblement National), which now sits in the European Parliament in the same group as the League, also maintains a certain distance from the rest of the far-right European formations.
And Vox has lately been closer to the Brothers of Italy party than to the Salvini formation.
