Partway through Donald Trump’s first presidency, Richard Grenell, the newly minted U.S. ambassador to Germany, made the extraordinary announcement that the Trump administration was hoping to boost the forces of the hard right throughout Europe. This was in keeping with Trump’s oft-stated dislike of the supranational principles of the European Union (EU), his support for Brexit, and his very public efforts to get leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel to clamp down on immigration from outside of Europe. Indeed, shortly after Grenell’s comments, media reports circulated that Trump was keen to see Merkel ousted as the German Chancellor.
This fall, nearly seven years after his comment about the European hard right, Grenell, an avatar of an Internationale-styled alliance for the hard right globally, was, apparently, on the shortlist to become Trump’s new Secretary of State. While he wasn’t ultimately selected, losing out to Florida Senator Marco Rubio and his more “establishment” credentials, Trump’s victory is nevertheless emboldening far right political groups and leaders throughout Europe and beyond.
Indeed, immediately after the election, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — long feted by Trump, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other MAGA denizens for his championing of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” and his belief that liberals are pushing a “great replacement” of white, Christian Europeans and Americans — announced that he had downed vodka in celebration of Trump’s win.
The admiration is mutual: Orbán’s willingness to clamp down on the free press, his populism (which is defined by racism, sexism and homophobia), and his manipulation of the electoral system to ensure the success of his hard-right Fidesz Party have largely made him an outlier in the EU, even as he has become a hero of the U.S. right. In 2022, he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the premier gathering of the U.S. right wing. Three years on, in a Trumpified Washington, the Hungarian leader will almost certainly be toasted as a great defender of “European values” — even as Trump is set to pull back from U.S. commitments to European defense and, in a move demonstrating a distinct lack of solidarity, to impose tariffs on imports from Europe.
In the days after November 5, global far right political figures from across the word — including Argentina, where the new president, Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, has been busily breaking apart his country’s democratic institutions — have been rallying to Trump’s cause. Around Europe, other far right figures similarly reveled in Trump’s victory, including Alice Elisabeth Weidel and Björn Höcke, the leaders of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has its roots in Nazi ideology; Geert Wilders, the politically powerful far right leader in the Netherlands; and many other fascist and nationalist figures. Writing in all capital letters, Wilders posted on X, “CONGRATULATIONS PRESIDENT TRUMP! CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA! NEVER STOP, ALWAYS KEEP FIGHTING AND WIN ELECTIONS!”
Wilders’ post is indicative of the far right’s shared sense that Trump’s win pushes them, too, that much closer to assuming power within Europe. Earlier this year, the AfD won state elections in the old Eastern Germany, in a seismic shock to the mainstream political parties.
Trump’s win further emboldens these far right forces in Europe, which are cynically deploying rhetoric about protecting working people in order to push an anti-immigrant, sexist, white nationalist and anti-environmental agenda.
The European far right’s joy at Trump’s win also dovetails with their sympathies for Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and their antipathy to the Ukrainians. In recent months, members of the European Parliament who caucus with the hard right Europe of Sovereign Nations group have boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the European Parliament, as have far right and far left figures in Germany and in Austria, in a similar move to GOP figures on Capitol Hill freezing out Zelenskyy.
In the U.K., the fiercely anti-immigrant politician Nigel Farage — on whose behalf Trump once lobbied as Farage sought to become the U.K. ambassador to the U.S. and whose Reform Party is currently making a serious run at replacing the Conservative Party as the main party of the right — lost no time in offering his services to the Labour government as something of a Donald Trump whisperer.
Because of his friendship with Trump, Farage argued, he was in a prime position to mediate trans-Atlantic deals with the incoming Trump administration and blunt the edge of Trump’s pro-tariffs sword. To its credit, the Labour government quickly sent Farage packing. I’d bet, however, that this isn’t the last of the issue; it ought to surprise no one if over the coming months Trump pressures Keir Starmer’s U.K. government to appoint Farage either as ambassador or as liaison with the new administration in D.C. I’d also wager that far right agitators such as Tommy Robinson — the founder of the racist English Defense League, and a man who, during Trump’s first presidential tenure, approached the Americans to ask for political asylum in order to avoid a prison sentence in the U.K. — may increasingly be feted by Trump administration stalwarts such as Elon Musk (whose X site gave Robinson back his platform after he had previously been banned for making racially inflammatory comments).
Trump has shown that he views everything, including bedrock alliances, as being transactional. Thus, it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise if the U.S.’s 47th president conditioned security agreements and reduced tariffs on European countries. If and when he does so, Brexit-era Britain, self-exiled from the EU, desperate to retain its relationship with the U.S. and, in its isolation, peculiarly vulnerable to the threat of tariffs, will likely be particularly pressured to embrace hard right stances on immigration and culture war issues similar to those pushed by the Trump administration.
How Europe responds to this stress test emanating from its erstwhile ally and security guarantor across the Atlantic will determine the viability both of social democracy and of the European Union over the coming years. Now that Trump — a man whose own former chief of staff says is an admirer of Hitler and is “fascist to his core” — is leading the GOP, we can expect the U.S. Republican Party to do everything in its power to seed discord and to boost the European far right in the years ahead.
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