The 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary begins in Budapest on Thursday.
While organizers claim it will celebrate the “Age of Patriots,” the conference’s main effect will be to lend powerful political cover to Communist China’s favored European collaborator, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Prominent American conservative commentators are attending the conservative conference.
American conservatives find legitimate appeal in Orbán’s focus on strong families, strong borders, and his skepticism of the European Union bureaucracy. But any American patriot should also judge very skeptically a leader who has sold out his country’s sovereignty in supplication to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in utterly groveling service to the Chinese Communist Party.
The facts are clear: Orbán’s government has embraced vast amounts of Chinese investment, Chinese spying tools, and CCP-directed universities. In return for this Communist gold, Hungary acts as President Xi Jinping’s primary servant in the EU. That service is priceless to Xi in that it greatly disrupts EU efforts to impose consequences on Beijing for its endemic espionage, vast export dumping, threats to EU politicians and member states, imperial ambitions in the Pacific, and its grotesque human rights abuses. So devoted is Orbán to Xi that he has even granted the Chinese intelligence services free rein to conduct aggressive surveillance operations on his soil, including against Americans.
CPAC doesn’t appear to care much about this dynamic. Indeed, there is a very striking incongruence between what CPAC says about China at its events in Washington and what CPAC says about China at its events in Budapest. A CPAC panel event in Washington last year declared that the United States should guide its policy toward Beijing on a simple basis: “We Win, They Lose.” In contrast, CPAC will feature major addresses from Xi’s top collaborators in Orbán’s government.
Orbán will deliver the keynote address. As they listen, American conservatives should remember that while the prime minister pretends to be a friend to President Donald Trump, he perpetually undermines Trump’s effort to check the aggression of America’s greatest adversary. Orbán’s pretense of American friendship represents an art form of hypocrisy. He says that China, not the U.S., “determines the course of world economic and world political processes.” Another major CPAC Budapest appearance will come via Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.
Last year, Szijjártó publicly adopted the exact opposite approach to that of the Trump administration when he pledged to Beijing that he would “enhance cooperation efficiency, oppose protectionism and insist on resolving trade frictions through dialogue and consultation.” If this seems like shameless deference to Beijing’s agenda, that’s because it’s supposed to be. As Szijjártó puts it, “We don’t see China as a risk, but as a country with which cooperation offers us immense opportunities.”
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Explaining why CPAC Budapest 2025 matters, Miklós Szánthó, the head of the Hungarian government-aligned Center for Fundamental Rights, stated that “citizens defending their homeland cannot afford complacency. We have no choice but to resist — because Hungary is our homeland.” This must be news to the CCP. After all, Xi and his apparatchiks must surely revel in the ease with which Orbán has sold out his homeland to Beijing.
CPAC Budapest attendees will discuss nationalism and traditional values this week. But Xi will be enjoying himself the most. While their generous attendance honorariums might make them feel good, these Americans are lending cover to a primary ally of their nation’s greatest adversary, one that is preparing to kill tens of thousands of Americans in a defining battle in the Pacific.