On holiday with Europe’s right-wingers

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NICOSIA — “We’re conservatives! We all like wine!” a voice rang out as the bus, filled with a few dozen European conservatives, snaked its way up the dusty hill, the roadsides lined with giant fennel in bursting yellow bloom.

Before the afternoon trip to the Cypriot vineyard, around 250 European Conservatives and Reformists Party aficionados tackled what was top of mind for the right-wing cohort. The list included north-south differences in conservative thought, the coming clamor for habitable land in Antarctica, and Turkey’s alleged plan to undermine the European Union’s Judeo-Christian roots by letting Muslim migrants and Islamist terrorists slip across the island’s long-contested border — and into the EU.

But now it was time for sightseeing and lunch. In the face of existential threats, these conservatives know how to balance working hard and playing hard, over a three-day weekend starting March 29.

The ECR, an umbrella of political parties around the continent, is overseeing a campaign to elect MEPs in June who represent hard-right national parties, including Poland’s Law and Justice, Spain’s Vox, and Italy’s Brothers of Italy.

With many Europeans unhappy about the flow of migrants over their borders and the rising cost of living, the ECR aims to become a significant player at the EU level, making a potential right-wing bloc a real possibility.

Some European right-wing leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy is part of the ECR, have a fan base that includes the likes of Steve Bannon, who served as chief strategist to the White House in the early months of former President Donald Trump’s tenure. Bannon once compared Meloni to ex-U.K. leader Margaret Thatcher, and has long supported her far-right Brothers of Italy party.

In order to galvanize its base, the ECR has planned more than 20 of these “culture weekends” since 2022. Using its European Parliament funds to bankroll heavily subsidized confabs — open to anyone willing to affirm their identity as a conservative — they combine policy discussions, political networking and high-end tourism at a heavy discount. (Just €370 bought two nights in the 5-Star Hilton Nicosia, roundtrip airfare, lavish meals, tours and networking galore — €305 for those willing to share their room.)

Evening fare “At the Crossroads of the Mediterranean” included a traditional Cypriot dance performance. One dancer balanced a tower of glasses on his head, wowing the crowd as party officials and MPs were invited to stand on chairs to add more to the stack — and even joined in a circle dance themselves.

Conservatives with both centrist and right-wing beliefs are welcome to dance in the ECR’s circle, and any potential tensions largely melted away over this long weekend crammed with poolside receptions, political rallies and a Sunday audience with the archbishop of Cyprus’ Orthodox church.

In between debates and dinners, guests took advantage of free time to stroll through Nicosia’s lemon-blossom-scented streets, stepping over the last of the season’s oranges and stray cats. Attendees included the usual suspects of political aides based in Brussels and the capitals, think tankers, even a lobbyist.

“The atmosphere is great, obviously. There’s good conversation all around,” said Jani Viitanen, a former vice president of Finns Party Youth — and one of the few attendees brave enough to speak on the record to a reporter. The wine tastings are a “very great addition,” he quipped. “As a Finnish person, it sometimes can be a bit challenging to socialize.”

Among the signs that this wasn’t the usual Brussels bubble event, live interpretation was available in Italian, Spanish, Greek and English — leaving out the Brussels working languages of German and French. Italian was the dominant language for schmoozing, often over cigarettes and the occasional cigar during coffee breaks in the 29-degree heat.

People who said they were only casually interested in politics took advantage of the cheap travel. A few families had kids in tow; one panel discussion about energy security seemed to have zapped the energy of a boy dozing in a chair.

Brussels powerbroker vs. anti-establishment

British Conservatives created the ECR in 2009 to stake out a spot on the right side of the European political spectrum: sensibly yet unmistakably conservative; highly resistant to giving Brussels more power; and yet still firmly part of the EU system.

Today, Meloni is the one straddling the contradictory dogmas of Brussels powerbroker and anti-European establishment.

She’s found a friend in U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while Commission President Ursula von der Leyen brought her along to celebrate a recent migration deal in Cairo. Meloni even reportedly convinced Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the EU’s internal contrarian, to drop his objections to more cash for Ukraine.

In recent years, the far-right Brothers of Italy, which Meloni leads, and Spain’s hardline nationalist Vox party have become significant players alongside more mainstream free-marketeers like the Czech Republic’s Civic Democrats.

Meloni, who was a member of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and whose party has fascist roots, rejects being called a fascist herself. On the international stage she supports Ukraine and keeps any criticism of Brussels muted, while remaining staunchly anti-immigration like her right-wing peers.

Over the course of the weekend, the ECR’s rhetorical and ideological positions came into focus: They want more Europe in the face of external threats from Moscow and migrants, but less Brussels micromanaging internally. They favor promoting (Judeo-) Christian values and fighting Islamist terrorists, but avoid disparaging all Muslims. And while many ECR member parties, including Poland’s PiS, Spain’s Vox and Cyprus’ ELAM have gone after LGBTQ+ rights, at the European level you’re more likely to hear ECR politicians declare themselves “anti-woke” and “pro-traditional family.”

With some overlapping ideology, ELAM — the acronym for Cyprus’ National Popular Front — was a hopeful addition to ECR’s hard-right members. The far right Cypriot party, which once had links to Greece’s now-defunct and outlawed neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, was the de facto host of the weekend’s program.

A strong Europe of strong nations can tackle what Sotiris Ioannou, an ELAM member of Cyprus’ parliament, called the big issues. Those include the economy, he said, the woke agenda and the terrorist threat from “the many Islamists in Christian countries.”

Known for its extremist and populist views, ELAM’s party leadership has built a platform on Greek-Cypriot ethnocentrism and anti-immigrant beliefs to ascend to power. It’s on track to win one of Cyprus’ six seats in the European Parliament in June.

They’re not yet members of the ECR — the European party isn’t accepting new members until after June’s election. But the weekend in Nicosia was clearly a test run for ELAM’s admission.

Extremist parties are having a renaissance in Europe, with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Portugal’s Chega and Alternative for Germany surging in power. The ECR prides itself on hosting parties that are ready to govern, but the space between the fringe and the mainstream is increasingly narrow. ELAM’s rise in the polls and increasing collaboration with the Cypriot government illustrate this trend.

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The mutual embrace shows the complicated path out of the political wilderness for the ECR, which lost its main power base during the Tories’ post-Brexit departure.

“It’s essential to emphasize that ELAM previously emerged as a sister party of Golden Dawn,” said Georgios Samaras, an assistant professor of public policy at King’s College London who studies both parties, as well as other far-right movements.

“Ideologically speaking, such associations do not simply vanish,” Samaras said, referring to the origins of both Brothers of Italy and ELAM.

ELAM’s integration with ECR, he continued, underscores how the ECR is becoming more radicalized.

‘We do not want to send the wrong message’

Over the years ELAM has been linked to violent attacks against minorities, clashes with the LGBT community, and using the pandemic to push an anti-immigrant message and sow distrust on vaccines. At the same time it has sought to burnish its outsider credentials with an anti-corruption message.

But ELAM’s most animating issue is migration.

After two attendees introduced themselves as Hungarian government staff, ELAM European Parliament candidate Geadis Geadi effusively praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s approach to migration.

Geadi had spoken about the issue the day before.

“Cyprus is under huge pressure by migrants,” he said during a panel discussion. “Most of them are Muslim.”

Even within Cyprus’ political mainstream, there’s broad political consensus that irregular migrant arrivals are out of control. More than 2,000 people — compared to fewer than 100 the previous year — arrived by sea in the first three months of 2024, mostly from Lebanon and Syria, prompting President Nikos Christodoulides to declare a state of crisis days after the ECR gathering.

The Greek Cypriot government accuses Turkey of importing asylum seekers by air to the section of Cyprus occupied by the government, and letting them cross the U.N. buffer zone into the EU country. Cyprus, which was partitioned in 1974, is separated by a buffer zone known as the Green Line that effectively divides its Turkish and Greek communities.

For ELAM, the increase in migration dovetails with another issue: falling fertility rates.

During a Saturday panel on European security, ELAM MP Linos Papagiannis tied the issue to reproduction. Cyprus is experiencing a drop in the number of births, Papagiannis said: While the Greek Cypriot birth rate is below 1.3, the overall average is 1.4.

“Unfortunately, we are talking about children born by asylum seekers or even illegal migrants,” he said. “We need to safeguard the indigenous population of each country.”

He soon added a caveat.

“We do not want to send the wrong message. We just want to point out that there is a risk with regard to Cyprus and Europe,” he said.

Later that evening, the audience swelling with 700 ELAM activists clad in black t-shirts, ELAM President Christos Christou was less cautious. “In 10 years we will be a minority in our own country,” he declared.

Though neither invoked the name, their words echoed the Great Replacement theory made popular by a right-wing French philosopher.

That theory argues, incorrectly, that immigration by Black and brown communities into Europe and the United States is an elite conspiracy to reduce the white population and strip it of power. As the shooter who killed 50 people in a New Zealand mosque in 2019 said in the opening line of a manifesto he entitled The Great Replacement: “It’s the birthrates.”

ELAM’s sharp anti-migrant rhetoric differs little from that of Cypriot government officials, who warn of “demographic change,” and has apparently helped ELAM reach the number three spot in the polls.

“We are not neo-nazis. We are not fascist,” said Ioannou. The party officially severed ties with Golden Dawn after Greece’s 2019 elections, citing “a different strategy and different direction.”

The ECR has “zero concerns” about ELAM’s original links to a neo-Nazi party, said Carlo Fidanza, head of the Brothers of Italy delegation in the European Parliament, in an interview alongside ECR Secretary General Antonio Giordano.

Fidanza’s party, after all, is overcoming its original links to neo-fascism.

Yet at a rally-style gathering a few hours later, with the 700 local ELAM supporters in attendance, the usually avuncular Giordano betrayed frustration with how ELAM was categorized.

“What should we do together?” he asked. “The first thing we do is we should fight against labels, because this is the first thing that the terrible mainstream does against us.”

The hard right’s governing aspirations

Dan Dalton, a former Tory MEP who was once part of ECR pre-Brexit, argued its core templates haven’t changed.

“Are you pro-NATO, Atlanticist, pro-trade, pro-national government?” he said in a telephone interview, referencing what he called the ECR’s core beliefs. “Parties that have anti-democratic roots would need to show a clear path away from those before they would be considered by the ECR.”

Dalton did not attend the event in Cyprus.

By contrast, he said, European families like Identity and Democracy, composed of far-right parties including Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally, are nearly the opposite. “They want to get rid of Europe; generally, they’re not friends of the Americans; they’re not free market,” he said. They’ve also been more sympathetic toward Russia’s Putin.

A hard line against Russia has always been part of the ECR’s identity. Indeed, Finland’s shiny new NATO membership was a useful talking point for Viitanen, the former vice president of Finns Party Youth.

“People here are really interested over Finnish military service and how it has worked so far,” Viitanen said.

The Finns Party, which leans more to the left economically, switched its European Parliament affiliation from the ID group to the ECR last year, citing the latter’s harder line against Moscow’s aggression.

Yet that line might be harder to hold as the ECR seeks to grow.

Those tensions played out after the winery visit in the Lefkara, where tour guides led visitors past stone-covered houses displaying the village’s traditional lace and embroidery.

After a stroll, an attendee from an Orbán-backed think tank was overheard defending the leader’s stance on Ukraine to a skeptical academic. Over beers on a cafe terrace, he argued the media downplayed Hungary’s contributions to humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

As Orbán grew more authoritarian in recent years, his party divorced from the EPP in 2021 before he could be kicked out. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Orbán has obstructed EU aid to Kyiv and praised Putin.

In recent weeks, Orbán courted the ECR and Meloni for an invite. The potential admission of Fidesz and other national parties sympathetic to Russia is proving divisive within the group.

But one factor makes both the Finns and Fidesz appealing additions for the ECR, despite some differences: They’re both in government.

“We are conservative parties oriented to the government,” Fidanza said. The ECR was founded by people in power, and others are ready to work for it.

Mainstream parties have for years promised to establish a cordon sanitaire against the far-right, sealing off extremist parties from government or power no matter their popularity.

In Nicosia, the far right’s governing aspirations were evident.

Spain’s Vox, a nationalist party that committed to a coalition with the country’s center-right last year, sent some 20 delegates, who unfurled their banner under a cloudless sky at the hilltop winery to pose for a group shot.

ELAM is looking for a playbook for lawmaking power, and made a pilgrimage to Rome late December to attend Meloni’s annual political festival. They, too, courted the ECR heavily to be allowed to spend a weekend on the island.

On stage during the conference’s opening sessions — after Geadi’s initial comments about Muslims coming into Cyprus — Giordano offered advice.

Don’t talk about moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims, he said. Muslims are, by definition, moderate. If you want to talk about those with a terrorist bent, go with Islamists, he advised. For the rest of the weekend, ELAM officials were disciplined in their use of the term Islamists.

These types of rhetorical distinctions can matter for parties that want to gain traction in mainstream politics. The ECR roadshow is a chance to “give the local party the right way to harmonize the discussion,” Giordano said.

Ioannou, the current Cypriot parliament member, is also a mayoral candidate in the port city of Larnaca. He said he wanted to ply attendees from governing parties for ideas.

“We believe we can share common experiences and common ways that help us to get good results,” he said. “We believe that will help us in the elections.”

Nektaria Stamouli contributed to this article.

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