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Valencia emerged as the focal point of European conservative politics between 19 and 22 November 2025, becoming a temporary institutional hub for the European right. Over the course of four days, the city hosted the Bureau meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Group and, on Friday the 21st, the public forum organised by New Direction. The concentration of events transformed Valencia into the most significant gathering point for the continent’s conservative movement since the European elections.
Senior policymakers, analysts, and political figures from across Europe travelled to the city, alongside an unusually large Spanish contingent made up not only of sitting MEPs, but also former MPs, regional and local office-holders, conservative academics, and strategists. The presence of numerous current and former representatives of both Vox and the Partido Popular — some attending formally, others informally — visibly reflected a broader expectation that Spanish conservatism is approaching a moment of reconfiguration. For many Spanish attendees, the meetings offered a chance to take the political temperature of Europe’s conservative family and to measure Spain’s standing within it at a time of internal fragmentation.
The ECR Bureau meeting opened with a detailed examination of Europe’s shifting geopolitical context and the strategic pressures now confronting the continent. One of the central sessions focused on Latin America, a region increasingly shaped by global rivalry. Venezuelan analyst and former presidential candidate Alejandro Peña Esclusa offered a structured analysis of China’s expanding influence in Hispanic America, identifying the mechanisms through which Beijing has deepened its presence in trade, infrastructure, and political alliances. His intervention underscored that Latin America has become a strategic arena where European inaction risks ceding influence to China by default, reinforcing the argument that the EU must coordinate closely with the United States if it wishes to remain a relevant actor in the region.
The Spanish ECR delegation played a notably prominent role throughout the Bureau’s deliberations. MEP Nora Junco delivered one of the week’s most comprehensive assessments of migration as an instrument of geopolitical pressure. She drew direct parallels between Turkey’s longstanding use of migration flows to influence Greece and Cyprus, and Morocco’s recurrent pressure on Spain, with the Canary Islands serving as a primary point of vulnerability. Her analysis highlighted the structural instability of the Atlantic route and the inability of existing EU policies to address the combined challenges of border control, hybrid coercion, and humanitarian strain.
Junco’s intervention was complemented by demographic and policy insights from Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, who stressed the urgent need for strict enforcement of existing European asylum legislation. MEP Geadis Geadi added a detailed account of the Eastern Mediterranean context, illustrating the degree to which state and non-state actors now use irregular migration systematically as a tool of leverage in both regional tensions and bilateral disputes. Together, their contributions framed migration as a cross-regional strategic challenge requiring sustained EU-level coordination.
Fellow MEP Diego Solier, Head of the Spanish Delegation at the ECR, directed attention to Europe’s technological and energy vulnerabilities, warning that the continent’s future competitiveness is threatened by its dependence on American and Chinese digital ecosystems and by the fragility of its energy grid. Solier argued that Europe’s capacity for industrial renewal is increasingly constrained by regulatory overload and supply-chain dependencies, and emphasised that technological sovereignty must form part of a broader European strategy aimed at restoring economic resilience.
These interventions contributed to a broader consensus across the Bureau: Europe’s security challenges are increasingly hybrid, interconnected and structural. Addressing them requires reinforcing border protection, consolidating technological autonomy, and ensuring that Europe possesses the infrastructure necessary to sustain political and economic independence.
Reclaiming Europe for Conservatism
Following the ECR’s internal sessions, New Direction convened its one-day forum Reclaiming Europe: Defending Sovereignty in a Multipolar World on Friday, 21 November. The event attracted a wide array of scholars, policy experts, journalists and party officials, capturing a broad cross-section of the continent’s conservative ecosystem. Nicola Procaccini opened the forum by invoking New Direction’s foundational mission — rooted in the intellectual legacy of Margaret Thatcher — and stressed the need for strategic clarity amid geopolitical disruption.
The first session addressed the intersection of migration, demography and welfare-state sustainability. Analyst Alejandro Macarrón presented demographic projections showing a deep and prolonged decline in Europe’s working-age population. He argued that migration policy can no longer be detached from demographic arithmetic or from the fiscal realities of ageing societies. Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, Co-founder and Director of the ‘Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie’ (OID), added that large-scale regular migration routinely generates secondary irregular flows via family reunification and onward movement mechanisms, placing additional pressure on host-country institutions and undermining social cohesion. Roméo Gbaguidi, President of Lemafriq, offered important insights into the migration situation in the Sahel.
Energy policy and technological autonomy formed the focus of the second major session. Experts such as Víctor González, former Vice-President of Vox, and Wolfgang Müller, from the Institut für Unternehmerische Freiheit, warned that elements of Europe’s green transition had been designed without fully considering industrial competitiveness, energy security or the resilience of supply chains. They argued that Europe risks entrenching structural dependence on foreign energy providers and external technological ecosystems unless a more pragmatic, security-led approach to the energy transition is adopted. Arvid Hallen, Director of Studies at Oikos also made some important remarks regarding CO2 emissions regulation.
The ECR Spanish Delegation also played the role of host at the event. And the forum’s keynote speech came from Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, who introduced the first report of Atenea, a newly launched Spanish conservative think tank. Espinosa provided a detailed diagnosis of Spain’s institutional fragility, pointing to the erosion of constitutional counterweights, the politicisation of judicial and regulatory bodies, and the weakening of parliamentary scrutiny. He contended that restoring institutional credibility is a precondition for Spain to regain both domestic stability and international confidence, and positioned this agenda as central to any meaningful conservative renewal.
A Shifting Landscape for Spanish Conservatism
Across both events, the presence of conservative figures from varied political backgrounds — including former MPs, regional councillors, local officials, policy specialists and emerging leaders — underscored a growing recognition that Spanish conservatism is entering a period of transition. Informal conversations, side meetings and the sheer diversity of Spanish attendees suggested that the fragmented conservative space is now actively searching for new reference points and strategic direction.
Valencia, in this sense, served not only as a setting for institutional meetings but as a diagnostic moment. For many participants, it provided a clear view of how Europe’s conservative landscape is evolving — and how Spain fits, or fails to fit, within that picture. The week closed with a broad assessment that Valencia marked the beginning of a wider realignment. It reaffirmed Spain’s place within the European conservative debate while highlighting that sovereignty, competitiveness and institutional restoration are likely to define the next phase of conservative politics both in Spain and across Europe.