Orbán and the United States have the right to unite with Cpac in Hungary for the ideology of the “great replacement” | Victor Orban

Hungarian nationalist leader, Victor Orbanwill be the featured speaker at a special session of the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to be held in Hungary this week, with the aim of cementing ties between the radical right on both sides of the Atlantic under the banner of the “great” ideology of “replacement”.

In a speech on Monday, Orbán made explicit reference to the ideology, which claims there is a liberal plot to dilute the white populations of the United States and European countries through immigration. Increasingly prevalent among American Republicans, the credo was quoted by the killer who opened fire on Saturday at a supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York.

Speaking in Buffalo on Tuesday, Joe Biden called it a ‘perverse ideology’ and a ‘lie’.

“I call on all Americans to reject the lie. I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and profit,” Biden said. “We have now seen too many times the deadly and destructive violence that this ideology unleashed.”

Orbán claimed this week that the Western world is “committing suicide” through immigration.

“I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants,” Orbán said in a speech at the occasion of the start of his fourth term. Echoing another popular theme from the American right, he argued that another form of cultural suicide was “gender madness,” a reference to the spread of LGBTQ+ rights in the West.

The prime minister’s choice of vocabulary was not accidental, Hungarian political analysts said, but rather aimed to highlight the common ties between his Fidesz party, his self-proclaimed “illiberal” form of government, and American visitors arriving in Budapest for the first time. never met the CPAC at Europe.

“I think it makes sense for him to report to American conservatives because of the upcoming CPAC,” said Zoltán Lakner, political analyst and editor of the Jelen newspaper. “He’s trying to define himself as a global political player, and at this point he’s kind of achieved that.”

One of the speakers at the event, Balazs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, told the Guardian that “there are political forces in every country that see the world the same way” as Hungary done, but he said the American right has shown exceptional encouragement.

“American conservatives are very supportive of us because they can see that we have huge domestic support and because they see Hungary as a conservative safe space,” Balazs Orbán said.

Alongside prominent figures from Fidesz, a range of other hard-right European leaders, speakers will include former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, Austrian Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl, and Santiago Abascal, president of the Spanish Vox party.

The US contingent will include several Republican members of Congress, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp. Most influential of all, Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson will address the conference, though he – like Meadows and Farage – will be attending virtually.

Carlson arguably did more than anyone to popularize the “great replacement theory” in the United States, promoting it on 400 of his shows, according to a New York Times analysis.

Carlson developed special ties to Orbán, originally through his father, Richard, whose political consultancy, Policy Impact Strategic Communications, lobbied for the Hungarian government. Last year, Carlson aired the weeklong episodes of his show from Hungary, featuring a sweet interview with Orbán himself, putting both the Prime Minister and his government in a positive light, and going under silence EU complaints against Orbán. independent media curbed and judicial autonomy, enriched his associates from the public treasury and reshaped the electoral laws to his advantage.

Earlier this year, Carlson produced another pro-Orbán program called Hungary against Soros: the fight for civilizationpointing to another ideological connection: the depiction of George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist, as a malevolent Jewish financier pulling the strings of immigration and other liberal policies.

“That much, [American conservatives] are studying the Hungarian model and see Hungary as a place where conservative policies can achieve their goals,” Boris Kálnoky, director of the media school at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (which received around $1.7 billion) told The Guardian. of Orbán last year). . “Orbán is someone who attracts attention. And those visits from Tucker Carlson, who has a huge influence in that community, certainly put the spotlight on Hungary.

Richard Kraemer, an American Republican and analyst at the European Values ​​Center for Security Policy (EVCSP) in Prague, expressed concern about the security implications of CPAC’s decision to hold its conference in Budapest which, after diplomatic expulsions in the rest of Europe following the invasion of Ukraine, is widely regarded as the most important Russian intelligence outpost on the continent.

“If you enter this environment, you look at – at least a point – about a thousand Russians linked to security agencies who are in Hungary at the moment. And to put that into perspective, they have 170 diplomats in Washington,” said Kraemer, co-author of a new EVCSP report this week that describes Orbán’s Hungary as “a proxy for Russia and China weakening Europe.”

“There are all these sorts of avenues through which they can put agents of influence in there and in front of the Americans, who are basically low-hanging fruit who have decided to get even closer to the ground by showing up at Budapest,” Kraemer added. “What particularly baffles me about this is that CPAC has essentially decided that the culture wars currently being waged by American conservatives are more important than American national security.”