Press reports often portray Europeans and others overseas as apprehensive when not downright fearful of President Donald Trump. But Trump’s victory has cemented a global alliance of populists, conservatives, and even libertarians who hope a “Trump effect” will sweep away entrenched institutions long controlled by the Left.

Indeed, Trump’s rapid-fire activity since taking office fills them with a mixture of hope and envy. At a summit of populist conservative leaders in Madrid last weekend, prime ministers and opposition leaders called Trump a “brother in arms,” a phrase often repeated, whose lessons they will draw.

That is because many of their constituents have been following events stateside. Europeans I have talked to know what executive orders are, and how they differ from acts of Congress, almost as well as any American. They already knew about the U.S. Agency for International Development (indeed, better than many Americans) because it is overseas that USAID imposes the rules of woke America on transgenderism, abortion, climate, and race.

There is almost a sense of awe. Politicians and voters alike watch Trump dispatch one agency after another with executive orders or eliminate programs such as diversity, equity, and inclusion and sense that there is a political tidal wave building on the other side of the Atlantic—one that, many hope, will soon make it across to them.

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Even here in this sunny Mediterranean port city 225 miles southeast of the hurly-burly of the national capital of Madrid, you can share glasses of Ribera del Duero with politicians who would be happy to have Trumpism come to Europe.

The lessons to be drawn from Trump, these Europeans are saying, is that political leaders must follow their principles and campaign promises and take decisive action. This involves removing regulation that strangles economic activity, protecting their nations’ borders, preserving and upholding national identity and culture, and returning to the scientific and time-tested understanding that there are only two sexes.

In Madrid, at the summit of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament on Friday and Saturday, leader after leader addressed a gigantic rally of 2,000 people and applauded “the Trump Effect,” also referred to variously as “tornado,” “hurricane,” and a much-needed “global disruption.”

“Everybody understands that something has changed,” Marine Le Pen, leader of Rassemblement Nationale, France’s largest opposition party, told the cheering crowd. “The results of the American election will sound the awakening of the Old Continent.” What is coming, she intoned, is “global change.”

“The Trump hurricane has woken the U.S. from an unbearable and sterile political correctness,” said Le Pen. The Trump administration is already forging links across the world, “whether in Latin America, such as with El Salvador and Argentina, or in other parts of the world, particularly in conflict regions.”

Added Le Pen, “We’re facing a truly global tipping point. Hurricane Trump is sweeping across the United States.” By comparison, that behemoth, the European Union, whose technocrats try to stymie populists such as Le Pen’s party, “seems to be in a state of shock,” she added. “We are the only ones that can talk with the new Trump administration.”

Patriots for Europe, which brings together the 13 Trumpiest parties in Europe, is the third largest force in the European Parliament. It counts among its members famous (and to the press, infamous) leaders such as Le Pen; Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban; Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands’s largest party in the governing coalition; Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini; and Santiago Abascal, who is the president of Patriots, leader of Spain’s Vox party, and was host of the summit.

These parties differ in important points. Le Pen’s party is pro-abortion, for example, a bitter pill to swallow for many of the other parties, which are pro-life. But they all have in common a defense of the return to national sovereignty from an encroaching EU and other globalist forces, the protection of national borders and the end to mass immigration, a skepticism toward climate alarmism, a desire for deregulation, and outright loathing for wokeism and critical theories.

Or, as the Netherlands’s Wilders put it from the podium on Saturday, “President Trump, to us, is like a brother in arms. … We fight for our values, family, and country. We refuse to bend our knee to the extremist agenda of the woke Left. We refuse to surrender to the guilt-tripping of the multiculturalists! … We cherish our cultural identity.”

The Patriots summit was indeed so Trumpy that its slogan was “Make Europe Great Again.”

“We are elated with his victory,” said Abascal when it was his turn to speak to a mostly Spanish audience. “We do not seek a savior from a foreign nation and much less an emperor. We seek, and have found, a brother in arms in our struggle.”

The sense was strong that Trump is not dictating to Europe to dewokify the Old Continent. President Kevin Roberts, who was invited to address the dinner that followed the summit Friday, the night before the rally, was the first to make clear that Trump and American conservatives in general were “brothers in arms.”

Abascal especially praised Trump’s dismantling of USAID, which he said had financed news media outlets that “demonize” their parties.

USAID has indeed financed not just domestic news media such as Politico, but anti-Orban outlets in Hungary and other countries, and other quasi-media outfits such as the shadowy Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which also receives funding from foundations funded by billionaire George Soros, and which has attacked American conservatives such as Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and even me.

European and American media, those subsidized by USAID and others independently owned, often decry the parties and politicians that compose patriots as racist, xenophobic, extreme right, and fascists. But the same insults were used against Trump, and the American voter just didn’t buy it.

“Yesterday we were the heretics. Today we are the mainstream. … We are the future,” proclaimed Orban. “The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a couple of weeks, and an era is over.”

Le Pen adopted a philosophical approach in speaking to the French press before the rally in Madrid. “At some point, you have to look at what’s happening in the world today: Milei, Trump, Orban, Meloni, our Austrian allied party is in the lead, we’re in the lead, our Flemish friends are in the lead. We need to analyze this, and I think we’re witnessing a kind of renaissance,” she said.

As she said, this hope for a Trump tsunami is not limited to Europe. Argentine President Javier Milei addressed the summit via video, as did Venezuela’s courageous opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado. One of the things that the leaders decided at their summit in Madrid was to grant the Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu observer status.

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Milei even spoke in these terms just after Trump’s second inauguration in January at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which is attended by exactly the globalist elites whom the leaders gathered in Madrid railed against.

He told those gathered that what many countries and institutions in the West had in common was “the mental virus of woke ideology. This is the great epidemic of our time, and it must be cured. It’s a cancer that must be removed.”

“This ideology has colonized the world’s most important institutions, from the parties and states of the free countries of the West to the organizations of global governance, passing through nongovernmental institutions, universities, and communication media,” said Milei. “Until we remove this aberrant ideology from our culture, institutions, and laws, Western civilization and humankind will not return to the path of progress.”

Trump, Milei told the stunned Davocrats, was trying to do this in America.

“I am not alone because, throughout this year, I have been able to find fellow fighters in this struggle for free ideas in all corners of the world. From the marvelous Elon Musk to the ferocious Italian lady, my dear friend Giorgia Meloni, from [President Nayib] Bukele in El Salvador to Viktor Orban in Hungary, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Donald Trump in the United States,” Milei said.

This has become the world’s pro-freedom alliance, or more like the rebel force confronting the woke empire that dictates to the world how to act. One word that resonated throughout the Madrid summit was “Reconquista,” a nod to the eighth-century battle by Christian knights to retake Iberia from Muslim invaders, and an assertion of their will to take back their nations and their institutions.