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		In EU, Bush Fans Are Few but Vocal Parliament Group Hailing From U.K. and East Europe Gets Tips From U.S. Right Wall Street Journal - 23 February 2005 By Mary Jacoby With his handlebar mustache, shiny wingtips and handkerchief tucked into his suit-jacket pocket, Roger Helmer usually blends right in with his fellow members of the European Parliament. But one day in September, the British Conservative let his real self show: He attended a session of Parliament dressed in a Bush-Cheney 2004 T-shirt. "As you might imagine, I got a lot of sideways looks," Mr Helmer says. But provocation was the point: "This place needs some shaking up," he says. As President Bush yesterday left Brussels for Mainz, Germany, on the next leg of his mission to repair the strained trans-Atlantic alliance, he left with mixed reviews. In the capital of the European Union, he visited friendly, but careful, top officials, who stressed their common interests with the U.S. president but acknowledged their continued differences. He didn't meet with rowdy, unabashed admirers such as Mr Helmer, who are mostly backbenchers with little clout. But as Mr Helmer optimistically points out, that is how a portly, firebrand Georgian named Newt Gingrich was once viewed in the House of Representatives before he nabbed its top job. Mr Helmer is the informal leader of a small band of British, Polish and Czech conservatives in the European Parliament who look to the American conservative movement for inspiration -- and hope to see a similar revolution one day in Brussels. These contrarian parliamentarians, few as they are, are starting to draw notice from the network of U.S. conservative activists who built today's Republican-dominated Washington. With two like-minded allies in the Parliament, Martin Callanan and Chris Heaton-Harris, Mr Helmer went to Washington last year at the invitation of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state and local legislators that grooms Republican candidates for Congress. The Britons attended one of Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist's exclusive Wednesday strategy meetings. They even got into a meeting in the White House complex with President Bush. Earlier this month, Ed Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, had breakfast with Mr Helmer's group in Brussels. Mr Feulner gave advice on tactics for spreading the free-market gospel in Europe, while the European conservatives warned that any attempts to unify Europe under a more federal-style government threaten U.S. power. Their position is lonely but not hopeless, Mr Feulner says. "They remind me of conservatives in Washington in the 1970s," he says. "Having been one when that was not a popular position, I don't underestimate the challenges they face. But you win converts, one by one." In his desire to shake up the European way of thinking, Mr Helmer has found allies among some of the new Polish and Czech members of the Parliament, who remain scarred by communism and militant about standing up to international thugs and dictators. The newcomers share with the far-right-wing Britons an intense opposition to a European constitutional treaty. It would help foster a "United States of Europe," they say, that would challenge American dominance -- and shrink from the Bush doctrine of spreading freedom and democracy. A Czech member of the pro-Bush faction, Jan Zahradil -- who may be his country's foreign minister if his party wins the 2006 elections -- says he supports Mr Bush because "any weakening of the United States means a de facto threat for the whole world, especially Europe." But even he warns of limits: "Speaking frankly, not all of his policies could or should be welcomed by our public." Indeed, although they are considered far right in Europe, President Bush's supporters in the European Parliament hold positions not exactly identified with U.S. conservatives. Mr Zahradil is an atheist who declares there is no God. Mr Helmer supports abortion rights. What they have in common is an acute sense of being oppressed by what they call a corrupt majority. They blast the EU for losing track of billions of euros in its annual budgets, and they deplore allowing members of the European Parliament to put family members on their public payrolls, as some have done.