At the "victory party" celebrating the Rassemblement National's results in the 2024 European elections and the creation of a parliamentary group in the European Parliament, Mormant-sur-Vernisson, France, June 9, 2025, CYRIL BITTON/DIVERGENCE FOR LE MONDE
Media training, economics and geopolitics classes, coaching in "cultural wars" and local wine tastings: In early December 2025, two organizations linked to Trumpism and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban brought together several dozen European and American nationalist activists for a three-day "bootcamp for patriots" at a conference center an hour and a half from Budapest. Amid the group of admirers of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement was Thibault François, a well-groomed thirty-something little known to the general public, but a key figure within France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party.
The former French MP acts as the diplomat for party leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, managing their European networks and leading the substantial RN delegation in Brussels with a firm hand as its secretary general. He represented the French far right at the studious bootcamp, which was organized under the auspices of the Conservative Partnership Institute, the influential incubator of the Trumpist "America First" doctrine. Co-organizers included an Italian think tank close to Matteo Salvini's Lega party, the Machiavelli Center for Political and Strategic Studies, as well as the Center for Fundamental Rights, a policy group with ties to the Orban government whose intentions are clear in its motto, "God, family, homeland."
