'We must take back institutions', Orban tells US conservatives

A Hungarian government-funded group, Centre for Fundamental Rights, was listed as one of the sponsors of the CPAC event. The rightwing PM also met the former US president Donald Trump earlier in the week.

Orbán arrived in Dallas after attracting new criticism with a recent speech where he talked about opposing "mixed race" societies.

The Hungarian prime minister dismissed criticism as fake news, and said that a "Christian politician cannot be racist".

He told conservatives to rally their troops for the upcoming midterm and in 2024 presidential elections which will take place the same year as the next European Parliamentary elections.

"We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels," he told the crowd.

"We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movement of our troops, because we face the same challenge," Orbán said, who is revered by the far-right and nationalist conservatives.

"These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for western civilisation. Today we hold neither of them. Yet we need both. We have two years to get ready," Orbán said of Brussels and Washington.

The Hungarian leader, who has eroded democratic checks and balance at home, told US conservatives, "we should unite our forces".

He accused the Obama administration of trying to force Hungary to rewrite its constitutions by deleting Christian and national values from it.

Orbán said the Biden administration of putting "Europe and especially Brussels under ideological pressure".

The Hungarian nationalist leader repeated that only US-Russian negotiations can end the war in Ukraine and that peace needs strong leaders.

"We need a strong America with a strong leader," he told the conservative crowd.

'Woke Globalist Goliath'

Orbán described himself as an "old-fashioned freedom fighter", and the "only anti-migration political leader" in Europe, whose country is under siege by progressive liberals day-by-day.

Orbán has won consecutive four terms in office after he rewrote the constitutions and the electoral law, and dominates the media, making him the longest-serving premier in Europe.

He described Hungary as "an old, proud but David-sized nation standing alone against the Woke Globalist Goliath".

He identified "gender, migration and the clash of civilisations" again as the main political battlefields of the future, however, he did not mention China, Russia, or the current economic worries.

Orbán, however, boasted about his government's family policies telling American conservatives to marry Hungarian women.

"Less drag queens, and more Chuck Norris," he told the crowd, saying "we don't need more genders, we need more rangers".

Orbán mentioned his self-declared nemesis, the Jewish Hungarian-born US billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, whose name was met with boos at the gathering.

The authoritarian leader said Soros thinks "that values dear to all of us led to the horrors of the twentieth century".

"The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some Western States in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values," Orbán claimed.

He said that "progressives are planning to do the same", give up western values. "Who is going to stop them if we don't?," he asked.