HUNGARIAN Prime Minister Viktor Orban hosted Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Italy’s leader of the League party Matteo Salvini in Budapest to call for a “resurrection” of Christian Europe ahead of the Easter weekend.

The trio are in talks on a reorganisation of hard-right politics within the European Union following the expulsion of Mr Orban’s Fidesz party from the European People’s Party, the European Parliament’s largest bloc including conservative parties like Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats.

They said they were discussing a project built around “Atlanticism, freedom, family, Christianity, sovereignty and opposing anti-semitism.”

Mr Morawiecki said Europe had “lost its roots” and could not be “a diktat of the strongest,” a reference to Poland’s current row with the European Commission over judicial independence.

And Mr Orban said he saluted Mr Salvini’s call for “a renaissance, a resurrection,” describing the former Italian interior minister — whose party is now part of Mario Draghi’s coalition government — as a “hero” for having blocked ships that had rescued refugees from drowning from docking in Italy and for prosecuting the rescuers.

Fidesz is without a European parliamentary group currently, while Poland’s Law and Justice sits with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the League with the Identity and Democracy group, which includes France’s Front National (FN). 

Ties between the French and Italian far right and their Polish counterparts have traditionally foundered over divisions on Russia. FN leader Marine Le Pen and Mr Salvini have praised President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Christian nationalism, while Russophobia is a major feature of eastern European right-wing politics. 

But Law and Justice MP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski told the Financial Times that if inviting the Identity and Democracy group into the ECR was the path to a more unified right-wing movement across Europe, “Le Pen [would not be] excluded.”

The imposition of “European values” proceeded this week in France, where the Senate passed part of President Emmanuel Macron’s Bill against “Muslim separatism” that bans minors from wearing hijabs at school and bans mothers from coming on school trips if they are wearing them.

Though France’s ban on “conspicuous religious symbols” is supposedly part of its commitment to secularism, critics say the laws are a racially oppressive tool directed at the country’s Muslims.