Europe’s Patriotic Turn: From Protest to Real Power in Brussels

For years, Brussels treated the rise of patriotic, sovereigntist and national-conservative parties as a temporary disturbance: a protest mood, a symptom of anger, an electoral accident that would eventually fade.

That reading no longer fits reality. Across Europe, these parties are no longer confined to the margins. They are shaping debates, conditioning majorities and forcing the old establishment to respond to issues it spent too long trying to neutralise rather than understand.

This weekend’s calendar in Budapest captures that shift with unusual clarity. On Saturday, March 21st, CPAC Hungary returns for its fifth edition, gathering international conservative and sovereigntist figures under a banner of open opposition to mass migration, gender ideology and permanent war politics.

The organizers present the event as a meeting point for the global anti-globalist right, and this year’s announced speakers again place Budapest at the centre of that ecosystem.

Then, on Monday, the Hungarian capital will host the first Patriots’ Grand Assembly, bringing together leading figures from the Patriots for Europe family and allied parties, including names such as Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, Santiago Abascal and Andrej Babiš.

The symbolism matters, but so does the arithmetic. According to the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), support for these forces increased in 22 of the EU’s 27 member states in the 2024 European elections, and, excluding non-attached members, parties in this broad family now hold just over a quarter of the seats in the European Parliament.

What gives the phenomenon weight is not only the number of seats in the EP but the way influence now travels through the institutions.

The most important change is that these parties no longer act only as outsiders denouncing Brussels from afar. They now shape decisions through national governments, coalition leverage, parliamentary pressure and agenda-setting.

SWP’s analysis is blunt: since at least the 2024 European elections, representatives of these parties have been involved in all major EU decisions, with their main centres of influence in the European Council and the Council of the EU, while their parliamentary weight has also grown enough to make alternative majorities possible. 

That helps explain why the change is increasingly visible in concrete policy. Migration is the clearest example. Positions once treated as unmentionable—tighter external borders, external processing of asylum seekers, repatriation mechanisms, resistance to compulsory relocation—have moved from the periphery toward the mainstream.

The same pattern is visible in climate and industrial policy. A 2025 paper from the Centre for European Reform argues that the nationalist and sovereigntist right is stronger than ever in the Parliament and has already made climate policy a testing ground for its influence, helping push the debate away from maximalist Green Deal ambitions and toward deregulation, cost concerns and national economic interests.

What establishment parties often describe as a “dangerous drift” looks, from another angle, like a democratic correction. Voters across much of Europe have spent years signalling the same concerns: uncontrolled immigration, loss of sovereignty, rising lack of security, cultural dislocation, high energy costs and a widening distance between governing elites and ordinary citizens.

The Finnish Institute of International Affairs noted even before the 2024 elections that these parties were gaining power not through one sweeping triumph, but through a process of creeping normalisation across both EU institutions and national politics. In plain terms, more and more Europeans no longer see patriotic parties as taboo, but as a legitimate vehicle for common-sense demands that mainstream parties have ignored for too long.

Budapest has understood earlier than most capitals that politics is not only about votes in plenary chambers, but about building a transnational intellectual and political network. That is why these back-to-back events matter.

CPAC Hungary is not just a conference, and Monday’s Patriots gathering is not just a photo opportunity. Together, they project an image of consolidation: a bloc that is increasingly coordinated, increasingly visible and increasingly convinced that Europe’s future will be decided not by further centralisation, but by the reassertion of nations, borders, democratic accountability and cultural continuity. Even critical observers now describe Budapest as a hub for the European and Western nationalist right. 

There are, of course, limits. These parties remain divided on some foreign-policy questions, on relations with Russia, on NATO and on the pace and scope of institutional cooperation among themselves. The centre-right EPP still occupies the pivotal position in the EU system, and the patriotic camp is not a single disciplined machine. But that does not diminish the core fact. The old cordon sanitaire is weaker, the taboos are eroding, and the establishment’s monopoly over what counts as respectable policy is breaking down. 

That is why the language used to describe the phenomenon matters. To call it merely a “surge” is already outdated. Europe is watching something more durable: the consolidation of a patriotic bloc that has moved from protest to pressure, and from pressure to power.