The Washington Post reports nationalist, MAGA-style parties are notching election victories and leading in the polls across Europe, but the “recipe for their success” appears to be steering clear of Trump and his MAGA allies.
“I can’t remember them being mentioned once,” said Leaders of Alternative for Germany politician Leif-Erik Holm, who finished first in a regional election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of his own campaign, which ended two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote.
The Post reports leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, “scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues.” And in France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling ahead of next year’s election, has similarly ejected Trump and his buddies from her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is now set to lead a state government with policies that could have come straight from the MAGA playbook, with the party having campaigned on deporting migrants and cutting funding to museums with “anti-patriotic goals.” Yet the Times reports Trump and the U.S. were “largely absent during the campaign.”
“A lot of people say Trump is arrogant, dangerous, not well-qualified. You see an intensification in his second term of things people didn’t like in the first term,” said Richard Wike, Pew’s director of global attitudes research. “That may create incentives for all sorts of political leaders not to embrace him.”
But backing Europe’s antiestablishment right was an official goal of the Trump administration. The Post reports the State Department even promised grants to organizations promoting what it described as “European sovereignty and other conservative values.”
“Late last year, an updated U.S. national-security strategy said the U.S. supported ‘patriotic European parties’ and would cultivate ‘resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,’” reports the Post.
But this year Trump has put his popularity and the popularity of his nation in a hole, and the Post reports an increasing number of countries view China “more favorably” than the U.S., and Xi Jinping “as a more credible leader in managing world affairs,” according to a Pew Research Center report. Similar surveys reveal many right-wing Europeans share unfavorable views of Trump.
For this, Trump can probably thank his war with Iran, which is continuing to obliterate his national and international standing — and threatens to destabilize the global and US economy with high energy prices.
“It looks like they launched this campaign without much of a concept. It’s a bit of a disaster,” said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, speaking of Trump’s war on Iran.
Additionally, Trump’s positions on a range of issues, including tariffs, the ownership of Greenland and the war in Ukraine, keep clashing with European interests — even the nationalist ones, reports the Times. Trump’s unbreakable link to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may have helped the leader lose his re-election bid, to Trump’s ire.