'Make Europe Great Again': European right makes pilgrimage to U.S.

Blue baseball caps and T-shirts sporting a continental version of Donald Trump's political rallying cry -- "Make Europe Great Again" -- abound at a gigantic conference center near the US capital Washington this week.

Leaders across the European right have arrived at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in droves, seeking ideas and insights from those at the heart of the movement that has reshaped the United States.

"This idea of America First, it also refers to what we would like, that is to say a little Europe First," Raphael Audouard, director of the Fondation des Patriotes pour l'Europe (Patriots for Europe Foundation), told AFP.

"The return to national borders, which is what Trump is defending, echoes what we're defending in different European countries," said the 32-year-old Frenchman, whose group is affiliated with the group of the same name in the European Parliament.

CPAC is an annual gathering of conservative leaders and activists that this year is celebrating Trump's return to the White House, with members of his administration and political allies featuring heavily among the speakers.

Many of the American attendees are "happy" to see that Trump's brand of bombastic populism is also inspiring European leaders, Audouard said.

But even amid the meeting of minds, he sounded a note of warning.

"We're aware that we shouldn't be naive," he said.

"Trump wants America first. But America first is not Europe first."

- 'Trump revolution' -

AFP

US President Donald Trump's rallying cry was seen everywhere at CPAC

Party leaders such as Britain's Nigel Farage, and prime ministers such as Slovakia's Robert Fico were among those making the pilgrimage.

Not all were singing from the same choir book.

France's Jordan Bardella, a member of the European Parliament and head of his country's anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party, announced he was canceling a speech to CPAC scheduled for Friday after Trump ally Steve Bannon made an apparent Nazi salute onstage a day earlier.

Others said they had come merely in the spirit of inquiry.

Romanian Diana Iovanici-Sosoaca, also a member of the European Parliament, explained that she was there out of "a curiosity what is happening here."

"There were times when Europe was great. Now it's low, it's down," said the lawmaker, who first made a name for herself on social networks in Romania for her opposition to anti-Covid measures.

That sense of a Europe in decline was a recurring theme among its attendees.

"Patriotic Brits... look across the Atlantic with envy," former British prime minister Liz Truss said in one CPAC speech.

"We want a Trump revolution in Britain," she said. "We want to be part of the second American revolution."

Trump's cost cutter-in-chief Elon Musk, who took the stage Thursday swinging a chainsaw presented to him by Argentina's President Javier Milei, called Europe a "collapsing society."

"It feels that way. It feels like France was nicer 50 years ago than it is today," claimed the world's richest person, who has made himself the US president's most powerful ally.

Former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told AFP the continent has focused on "stupid priorities... on the wrong priorities, like accommodating as many illegal migrants as possible."

The US and Europe are experiencing "a difficult and very dangerous moment when both parts of the transatlantic community, so to say, are getting more and more away from each other. And I'm very much concerned about this," he said.

"I try to explain, translate the European language to the American language and vice versa. That's my major objective here."