Obviously, it's hard to beat Elon Musk. When the Tesla and X boss received a chainsaw on stage from Argentina's ultraliberal President Javier Milei on February 20, he brandished it like a weapon, to threaten the notorious bureaucracy he's promised to destroy in Washington. Behind his futuristic glasses overshadowed by a black cap, Musk thereby provided the CPAC convention, a not-to-be-missed annual gathering of American conservatives, with its image of the year. But behind the virality of the moment, the main interest of this three-day meeting organized in a huge hotel in Maryland, near the federal capital, was the creation of a transatlantic web. Representatives of Europe's national-populist right flocked in greater numbers than ever, eager to get close to the Trumpist talisman, to feel its warmth and master its inner workings.

Over the years, CPAC has become an incubator for the world's identitarian right. This time, however, it had a unique character, generated by the backlash caused by the return of Donald Trump. In terms of protocol, the leading European representatives were the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who spoke via video on Saturday, and the Slovak and Macedonian prime ministers, Robert Fico and Hristijan Mickoski. Viktor Orban, their Hungarian counterpart, was absent, but his camp was well represented. Former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki also took to the stage.

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