Ordo Iuris at Tradfest 2026 in Zagreb: Conservative Thinkers Declare the Liberal Order Is Falling

After an eight-year hiatus, the Tradfest conference returned to Zagreb, Croatia, on Friday, April 24, evening with a session titled “The Fall of Liberalism and the Reemergence of Christian Nations.” Organized by Croatia’s Vigilare Foundation and Ordo Iuris Croatia, and co-partnered with the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation, the event drew an international roster of conservative thinkers, activists, and officials. Among the featured voices was Olivier Bault, Director of Communications of Warsaw’s Ordo Iuris Institute, who delivered pointed remarks on electoral interference and the ongoing democratic backsliding in Europe.

The evening opened with remarks from Cardinal Emeritus Vinko Puljić of the Vrhbosna-Sarajevo Archdiocese, followed by welcoming addresses from Vigilare Chairman Vice John Batarelo and Krešimir Grebenar of Ordo Iuris Croatia. Mario Enzler, Senior Advisor to the President of the Heritage Foundation, also spoke briefly before keynote presentations began.

Batarelo and Grebenar: A Civilizational Crisis

Batarelo set the tone by declaring that the liberal world order is disintegrating and that Croatia stands at a crossroads. He pointed to a grassroots spiritual renewal within Croatian society — from large Catholic processions in Zagreb to a world-record rock concert with Christian themes — arguing that Generation Z is turning back toward faith, family, and homeland. He urged Croatians to stop deferring to Brussels and to define their national interest with conviction.

Grebenar delivered a more systematic philosophical indictment of liberal modernity, arguing that the West’s crisis is not merely political or economic but “fundamentally ontological.” Drawing on natural law theory and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, he contended that contemporary liberal democracies have severed the legal order from its metaphysical foundations, reducing law to an expression of pure will. He drew a provocative parallel between the EU’s expanding regulatory apparatus and communist-era structures, invoking the ideological lineage running from Antonio Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, and questioning whether the EU is on a trajectory toward becoming, as he put it, “the EU-USSR.”

Heritage Foundation Speakers: Trump’s Geopolitical Vision

Mario Enzler provided a brief overview of the Heritage Foundation’s mission before the floor was taken by James Carafano, Senior Counselor to the President and E.W. Richardson Fellow at Heritage. Carafano offered an expansive defense of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, arguing that the president has recognized what no previous American leader fully grasped: that no power today has the capacity to maintain a traditional sphere of influence. In place of that model, Carafano said, Trump is building connectivity — through the Three Seas Initiative, the Artemis Accords, the Pax Silica minerals pact, and regional corridors linking Central Asia to Europe. He argued that Croatia, at the geographic heart of these new networks, is ideally positioned to benefit from this reorientation, calling it “the greatest future you could possibly have.”

Kaush Arha of the Atlantic Council offered a complementary perspective, arguing that genuine transatlantic partnership requires greater symmetry. He emphasized that European allies must develop sufficient conventional deterrence capacity before expecting American backing, and predicted that a more reciprocal trade relationship currently being negotiated will ultimately strengthen the alliance.

Brian Brown, President of the International Organization for the Family, made the case that the Trump administration has advanced social conservatism more decisively than any of its predecessors. He highlighted the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the dismantling of USAID programs funding gender ideology abroad, and the federal push to ban gender transition procedures for minors. Brown catalogued specific USAID expenditures — including DEI programming in Serbia worth $1.5 million and LGBT initiatives across the Western Balkans totaling nearly $4 million — arguing that American taxpayer money had been systematically weaponized against traditional values in Europe and beyond.

Panel Discussion: Elections, Interference, and Ordo Iuris Poland

The evening concluded with a panel moderated by political commentator Mate Mijić and including all three keynote speakers alongside Márton Ugrósdy of Hungary’s Prime Minister’s Office and Krešimir Grebenar of Ordo Iuris Croatia and Olivier Bault of Ordo Iuris Poland.

Ugrósdy opened the panel discussion by describing Hungary’s recent election loss as less a reflection of organic democratic change than of systematic foreign pressure. He noted that the European Commission had presented the new Hungarian government with a 27-point list of demands the day after the election — including rolling back child protection legislation banning LGBT content in schools — and warned that Hungary faces a stark choice between national sovereignty and “30 pieces of silver” from Brussels.

Bault then took the floor to detail his organization’s election observation findings. He was careful to note that the loss itself is not surprising after 16 years in power, and that the voting process was technically clean. What Ordo Iuris documented, he explained, was a campaign marred by at least three distinct forms of foreign interference. First, the European Commission had withheld approximately 17 billion euros in cohesion and NextGenerationEU funds from Hungary, creating economic pressure that the opposition candidate explicitly promised to relieve upon taking office — a pattern Bault compared directly to Donald Tusk’s similar pledges in Poland. Second, the Digital Services Act’s rapid-response mechanism was activated during the campaign period and, in the observation mission’s assessment, was used to systematically suppress the reach of pro-government messaging on Facebook — a particularly significant intervention given that roughly 65 percent of Hungarian voters rely on the platform for political information. Third, recordings of private conversations between Hungarian officials and their Russian counterparts were leaked just days before the election by a journalist who openly admitted having received them from a secret service within another EU member state.

Bault drew an explicit parallel between the post-election pressure on Hungary’s institutions and what he described as the “militant democracy” being imposed in Poland under the current government, with the backing of Brussels. He directed the audience to Ordo Iuris’s English-language website, where the institute has published three detailed reports on rule-of-law violations in Poland. “I wouldn’t be so sure about the coming fall of liberalism in Europe,” Bault cautioned, “because there’s a system being put in place” — one that, combined with artificial intelligence, could become increasingly effective at steering election outcomes across the continent.

A New Chapter for Tradfest

Friday’s session marked the first Tradfest since 2018, a gap that moderator Mijić acknowledged as both “monumental” and overdue given the urgency of the political moment. The Vigilare Foundation and Ordo Iuris Croatia announced that they intend to hold future editions at regular intervals starting from this year, signaling a renewed commitment to building a durable platform for conservative exchange in Central Europe.