CPAC holds its first meeting in Poland ahead of crucial presidential runoff

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The Conservative Political Action Conference, the U.S.’s premier conservative gathering, held its first meeting in Poland on Tuesday, just five days before a tightly contested presidential election between a liberal mayor and a conservative backed by Donald Trump.

CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp opened the proceedings with a fiery speech, claiming that conservatives around the world are locked in a battle against “globalists,” whom he described as enemies of faith, family and freedom.

Kristi Noem, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary and a prominent Trump ally, is scheduled to speak at the Warsaw event in the afternoon. She is also expected to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative whose second and final term ends in August.

The two candidates vying to replace Duda offer starkly different visions for Poland: Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, and Karol Nawrocki, a conservative historian backed by the ruling Law and Justice party.

Schlapp claimed CPAC had stood by Trump throughout his legal battles and declared that similar threats were playing out in countries like Poland.

“Are you happy that America is getting closer to being great again?” Schlapp asked the crowd. “Did the reelection of Donald Trump bring you joy?”

“When one of us is under attack, the rest of us must come to that person’s defense,” he added. “The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.”

He said that’s why it was important to “win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere.”

CPAC is the United States’ premiere conservative gathering, dubbed “Woodstock for conservatives” after the legendary 1969 concert and hippie carnival. The meetings, which started in 1974, used to champion tight budgets and a hawkish foreign policy, but have steadily been taken over by the Trump wing of the Republican party. CPAC has rebranded itself as a celebration of the U.S. president’s populist approach.

At the same time, it’s reached out to other conservative populists with a stated goal of helping grow a global conservative movement. CPAC has held gatherings in Japan, South Korea, Mexico City and Israel. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his staff have become regular speakers, as has former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The gathering in Poland follows multiple CPAC meetings in Budapest.

The meeting in Warsaw includes some of the traditional U.S. conservative activists who attend the domestic gatherings, who carry extra weight now because of their new influence with the Trump administration.

That includes John Eastman, a scheduled speaker and conservative lawyer who was the architect of much of Trump’s unsuccessful strategy to overturn his 2020 election loss.