BRUSSELS — Last year’s gathering of Europe’s far right in Brussels took place behind metal shutters after protesters, police and city politicians tried to stop it from going ahead. This year, the doors are wide open — albeit flanked by security guards — and it’s the EU’s mainstream leadership that is under siege.

Just a day after the EU was rocked by the arrest of two senior figures in a corruption probe, many at the Battle for the Soul of Europe conference — hosted by MCC Brussels, a think tank with close links to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and bringing together top officials from Budapest with right-wing politicians, activists and commentators from across the continent — said the time was right to channel public anger at the establishment.

The latest corruption scandal is “another sign of double standards,” Balázs Orbán, political director to the Hungarian prime minister and the keynote speaker at the conference, said in an interview with POLITICO.

“A corruption-based technocratic elite is mismanaging procedures. This element is very strong and it’s quite visible for the European voters but if you talk to Americans … this is what they see from Europe.”

Prime Minister Orbán has repeatedly blasted the “EU elites” as out of touch and has sought to blame them for freezing funding for his own country over backsliding on democracy and the rule of law.

There was a bullish mood at the event, held a stone’s throw from the EU Quarter of Brussels.

Polish politician Ryszard Legutko, co-chairman of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, took aim at Commission President Ursula von der Leyen herself.

“The fish stinks from its head,” he blasted.

John O’Brien, one of the organizers of the two-day conference, which kicked off on Wednesday, said “a couple of years ago people were scared to say some of these things about immigration, to raise concerns about environmental extremism, to talk about the mismanagement of economies … now, people are really finding their voices.”

“It’s been demonstrated the last few years, time and time again, that Europe is dirty and needs to be cleaned up,” said O’Brien, as waiters in bowties served coffee to attendees.

The latest embarrassment for the EU — the detention on Tuesday of former Commission Vice President Federica Mogherini and ex-top diplomatic official Stefano Sannino as part of a fraud probe — has given the right plenty of ammunition.

At a panel on Thursday, French National Rally MEP Thierry Mariani and British political commentator Matthew Goodwin are set to take aim at the “deep-state web of civil service, NGOs and captured institutions.”

Alice Cordier, a French activist and president of the Nemesis Collective, a self-described feminist campaign group that has been branded a far-right Islamophobic outfit by critics, said “corruption is a big issue.” The scandals, she said, compound public anger that has so far been focused largely on the consequences of migration.

Balasz Orbán, however, was skeptical that the scandal would be a game-changer for national elections, including his own boss’s tough re-election fight next year. “Honestly,” he said, the internal corruption allegation is “not a big surprise for me, so it doesn’t add too much.”

But according to Daniel Freund, an MEP from the German Greens, the far right is not “in any position” to credibly champion the anti-corruption cause.

“They are the problem, not the solution,” Freund said, adding that the far-right Patriots group [in the European Parliament, to which Orbán’s Fidesz party belongs] has voted against “almost every measure that would strengthen the fight against corruption.”

For now, the EU’s political leadership has been muted on the fraud investigation and is firmly on the defensive, its hands tied by ongoing legal proceedings. That has some worried: “The credibility of our institutions is at stake,” said Manon Aubry, co-chair of The Left group in the European Parliament.

Others from von der Leyen’s own governing coalition want to see her take an unequivocally tough stance before her opponents capitalize on the idea that the Brussels bureaucracy is awash with the abuse of public money.

“It needs to be dealt with at a European level,” said Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle, a Dutch MEP from the centrist Renew faction. “Whether it is … Qatargate, or these new fraud suspicions. Zero tolerance and more tools to tackle this.”

Max Griera and Dionisios Sturis contributed reporting.