On Tuesday, Danube Institute organised an event, where a panel discussion on the historic election in Italy was hosted. Commentators discussed how Giorgia Meloni’s win could affect European politics, and what impact it could have on Hungary.
Defying threats to her life and a concerted media smear campaign, Giorgia Meloni is set to write history as Italy’s first female prime minister.
French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty on Monday of embezzling European Parliament funds and barred from standing in elections for the next five years. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, along with other prominent figures of the European right, expressed solidarity with Le Pen and condemned the conviction.
‘Pro-war, anti-Trump, and frustrated European leaders are coming together with the clear intention of obstructing a peace agreement,’ Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó stressed on Monday. He was referring to the emergency summit hosted by Emmanuel Macron in Paris, where the most influential European countries are gathering to respond to US-led peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
Roberta Metsola and Ursula von der Leyen are at the centre of a growing scandal involving undisclosed EU millions channelled to pro-EU media to shape the narrative ahead of the 2024 European elections. The case bears striking similarities to the USAID controversy and further erodes public trust in institutions and the media.
Elon Musk has posted on X that the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was caught funnelling $59 million to hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants, while it was not able to help victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in late 2024. Four FEMA employees, including CFP Mary Comans, have been terminated as a result of the scandal.
Elon Musk asked his 216 million followers on X if his new DOGE agency should ‘audit the IRS’, the US government agency tasked with collecting tax revenue from US residents. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority voted yes, and Musk seems to take ‘the voice of the people’ seriously, as he demonstrated with the unbanning of Donald Trump on his platform back in November 2022.
‘I was just in Poland. They’re very interested in doing a CPAC in Poland, which I think could have a positive impact from what I can see. If you’re in European politics, it’d be nice if Prime Minister Orbán had more allies in the EU,’ Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp told our site.
Despite desperate efforts to capture the attention of the new US administration, Donald Trump’s foreign policy team does not appear interested in engaging with the European Union as a bloc. Instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has prioritized bilateral discussions with individual member states. This approach offers European nations an opportunity to reclaim their sovereign foreign policy, which has increasingly been overshadowed and taken over by Brussels in recent years, often against their will.
‘Across various European nations conservative and right-wing parties have capitalized on issues like immigration, national identity, and dissatisfaction with traditional political establishments to gain substantial electoral support…without the epochal change on 6 November 2016 in the United States, these shifts in Europe would have taken much longer.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.