Under the watch of stern, bearded patriarchs inside gilded frames and the blue-red-yellow banner of the Paneuropean Union, two-dozen political aides, academics and activists gathered to debate an idea long treated as heresy in Brussels: a right-wing case for the European Union.
The setting — the Flemish House, in the capital’s institutional core — reflected the paradox driving the effort: turning a politics of nations into a politics of Europe. Can the political right, long defined by national loyalties, cohere around a distinctly pro-European identity?
Young, mostly male and firmly anti-immigration, the movement pairs calls for a stronger, more unified continent with a eurocentric narrative rooted in civilizational terms.
In the past year, parties, think tanks and online networks pushing this vision have gained steam across the continent, buoyed by Russian aggression and a new pro-European mood sharpened by repeated threats by U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Every day we get messages and calls and emails from young guys in the bubble, from all over Europe, who say, ‘I want to be a part of it, because I'm politically homeless,’ said Dawid Piotrowski, the Polish president and founder of the Charlemagne Club that hosted the February event. “What really inspired us is the Brussels ecosystem, which is barren when it comes to right-wing pro-Europeanism.”
A new European right-wing playbook
The Charlemagne Club is a Brussels-based think tank birthed in October 2025 to, in the words of its founders, “fill out this particular niche of right-wing pro-Europeanism.”
Its members hail from a range of former camps, spanning the center-right European People's Party to further right groups orbiting the Europe for Sovereign Nations party. Together, they share the view that today’s right wingers are leading Europe astray.
The Hungarian-backed MCC think tank, for example, has long championed Viktor Orbán-styled Eurobashing — reliably framing the bulk of EU-level policy as an attack on the sovereignty of member states and the rights of their citizens.
But for younger conservatives like Belgian entrepreneur Yaro Deli, that instinct is misguided. Instead, he co-founded the Charlemagne Club not to fight the EU, but to remake it from the right.
Since then, it has hosted events for Brussels insiders, launched a newsletter, podcast and video content and built a network of like-minded people across the city. Its agenda blends a self-described patriotic Europeanism with hardline opposition to migration, alongside calls for a European defense union, more integrated capital markets and expanded use of qualified majority voting in the European Council.
At a late-January event hosted in the European Parliament, the Charlemagne Club drew over 100 attendees to debate “Pro-Europeanism on the Right.” Hosted by Alternative for Deutschland MEP Tomasz Froelich (ESN, DE), the event centered on the larger movement’s leitmotif: that a patriotic, conservative vision for Europe is needed in a new era of global power politics.
Froelich told the audience of the need “to build a European order that honors […] the richness of our civilization.” The founders of the Charlemagne Club said they were “pleasantly surprised” that even historically Euroskeptic parties such as the Alternative for Deutschland, that has long flirted with the idea of Germany exiting the EU, were open to pro-European discussions.
Beyond 'petty nationalism'
The movement reaches beyond the EU quarter. Ave Europa, a political group with a similar outlook, has grown rapidly since launching last spring — establishing footholds in countries including Germany, Denmark and France.
Now boasting more than 700 members and a 60-member think tank, it’s organizing its first-ever general assembly in May at a Black Forest castle outside Strasbourg, drawing MEPs such as Petras Auštrevičius (Renew, LT) alongside academics and business leaders. The longer-term ambition is to field candidates first for local and later Parliament elections.
Nikodem Skrobisz, formerly the group’s spokesperson, said that polling shows an appetite for a conservative, pro-European party. Only 36% of native-born EU citizens believed immigrants improve their country, according to a 2023 European Social Survey. Meanwhile, a 2025 Eurobarometer survey showed 89% support for a more united Europe while 86% of respondents wanted the EU to have a stronger international voice.
Skrobisz argued that both “petty nationalism” and the EU’s universalist model of governance have run their course, positioning Ave Europa against both nationalist retrenchment and the values-centric pro-Europeanism championed by Volt, the progressive pan-European party with five MEPs.
But a strong, pro-Europe patriotism, as the movement proposes, is still far from the mainstream of right-wing thinking.
Ave Europa was recently riven by internal schisms after politicians from more nationalist parties like AfD and the Freedom Party of Austria were invited to the group’s upcoming assembly in May. Now the group is in a “state of civil war,” said Skrobisz, who resigned from the group in March in protest, while the Dutch and Polish country chapters have seceded. Ave Europa didn’t respond to The Parliament's request for comments.
A battle for Europe’s past
The new conservative, pro-European movement isn’t only trying to shape the continent’s future, it’s also seeking to transform how Europeans understand their past.
The February event featured an hour-long PowerPoint and subsequent debate on the life of Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, author of the 1923 book Paneuropa and a driving force behind the early European integration. An Austrian aristocrat of Japanese and Austro-Hungarian heritage, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Paneuropean Union and advanced a distinctly civilizational vision for Europe, said Patrick Pasture, a history professor at KU Leuven.
Though influential in the interwar years, Coudenhove-Kalergi was sidelined after 1945, Pasture said. In his place, figures like the communist and Italian Resistance member Altiero Spinelli — and his Ventotene Manifesto — took center-stage with a vision for a Europe rooted in social democratic thinking.
Today, Spinelli’s name graces the Parliament building in Brussels, while Coudenhove-Kalergi’s book Paneuropa gathers dust in a corner of the House of European History.
That’s a mistake, said David Engels, a Belgian historian who spoke at January’s event at the European Parliament. He told The Parliament that the “genesis of the European Union was more a conservative than a liberal project […] the claim that the left is Europeanist whereas the right must be sovereigntist, is totally erroneous,” while pointing to European traditions such as Greco-Roman thinking, Christianity and the early Middle Ages as critical to strengthening the European project.
To conservatives at the Charlemagne Club and Ave Europa, or academics like Engels, the importance of that shared history is something both left-leaning Europeanists and right-wing nationalists ignore.
But while Christianity has played an oft-ignored role in the longer history of European integration, Pasture said, European identity can’t be reduced to history and traditions either, adding that the term “civilization Europe” has dangerous connections with the longer history of Western ideas of superiority.
He said the movement rests on a mythical view of Europe’s past. "It is based on ideas of Western superiority […] to resuscitate that, to me, is completely absurd and would rather be self-destructive.”
For the Charlemagne Club’s leaders, the plan is straightforward: host events to knit together the nascent pro-European right in Brussels, expand their media footprint and cultivate the talent they hope will one day carry the movement into power across Europe.
“It’s like mushrooms coming out of the ground after the forest rains,” Skrobisz said. “We are popping up everywhere.”
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