The Budapest-based think tank Center for Fundamental Rights hosted Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp for a press conference on Thursday, 30 January. He and the Center’s Director General Miklós Szánthó addressed the press at a joint event.
Mr Szánthó announced that CPAC Hungary will be taking place for the fourth time on 29–30 May 2025. Mr Schlapp’s organization, the ACU has been in charge of the CPAC events since 1974. The keynote speaker of CPAC Hungary 2025 will be none other than Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Mr Szánthó also proclaimed that ‘the Age of Patriots’, the words which were also painted on the wall behind the speakers, is here with the election of Donald Trump in the US presidential election and the forming of the Patriots for Europe faction in the European Parliament. Both of these events took place last year, 2024, a great year for conservatives around the world. He also told the audience that ‘we are in the middle of a global “regime change”, when the dominance of the West is being brought into question.’ Thus, ‘the stakes are higher than ever before,’ he added.
While the right-wing forces have achieved some big wins worldwide recently, Mr Szánthó continued, the Age of Patriots can only last long if the ‘the waves of change on both sides of the Atlantic meet in the middle,’ as he put it.
Mr Schlapp started by lauding the ‘special relationship’ Hungarian and American conservatives have, and even admitted that the right-wingers of the US can learn a few things from their Hungarian counterparts. He also told the audience that ‘[Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán has had an amazing impact on the world’. Since he was the first to be brave and speak up against things like mass illegal migration and globalism, other people could be brave too and do the same.
As for his home country, he said that the United States was ‘sliding fast into the abyss’ before Donald Trump’s victory last fall. With his win, however, common sense can return to the American government, he joyfully added. DEI and modern gender theory were running rampant in the American public sector and the corporate world alike, but thankfully, that is already changing.
Director General Szánthó took back the floor to highlight that ‘our allies in the United States are no longer in the opposition, which is a great asset’; and went on to state that this also means that the Brussels bureaucrats have lost the support of Washington, DC. Mr Schlapp said in response that every right-wing American political figure who has been invited to Hungary has always been very happy to come, and many of them view the country as ‘a jewel of free speech where woke has been defeated’.
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