By: V4 Agency
At the invitation of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s senior ruling coalition party Law and Justice (PiS), several leaders of European conservative parties arrived in Warsaw on Saturday for a conference. The list of attendees included Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, French National Rally party leader and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and Spain’s Vox party leader Santiago Abascal. Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki also attended the meeting.
The Warsaw Summit, involving 13 leaders of European conservative parties, began in Warsaw, Poland on Saturday. The discussions focused on the future of the European Union and future cooperation between European conservatives. According to Polish public television TVP Info’s report, the Warsaw Summit is the next step after the joint declaration in July on the future of Europe. In that document, ten European conservative parties took a firm stand by the original idea of the European Union and rejected its centralisation.
In a social media post published at the start of the meeting, PiS Secretary General Krzysztof Sobolewski said the summit participants were also seeking answers to threats such as those arising from the European Commission’s moves that contravene the Treaties.
We want a European Union of nations, of sovereign governments; we want the citizens rather than technocrats to have more rights and a larger say in the EU” PiS MEP Tomasz Poreba told journalists at the event.
The leaders of Italian right-wing Lega and Italian Brothers parties, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, did not attend the meeting. Their absence is reportedly due to other commitments, but they are both open to meetings at a later date.
Hungarian Family Affairs Minister Katalin Novak shared the joint statement adopted at the Warsaw meeting on her Twitter account late on Saturday afternoon. “We agreed on engaging in closer cooperation, organizing joint meetings, and aligning the votes on common issues. We will continue to work for the renaissance of the European right,” she wrote as a summary of the statement.
Viktor Orban and Mateusz Morawiecki had a separate bilateral meeting
Border security issues in the region, the situation on Polish-Belarusian border and in eastern Ukraine were among the points on the agenda of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s meeting with his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban in Warsaw on Friday. The meeting was announced by the Polish Prime Minister’s Office on Twitter.