Analysis
Second
Trump reign could make life ‘a lot harder’ for EU’s far-right leaders
Jon Henley
Europe
correspondent
They
celebrated his victory - but Trump’s trade tariffs and America first policies
could backfire on the likes of Orbán, Meloni and Wilders
Sun 17 Nov
2024 06.00 CET
In the end
Viktor Orbán didn’t, as he’d promised, celebrate Donald Trump’s win with
“several bottles of champagne”. He was in Kyrgyzstan, he apologised, “where
they have different traditions” – so it was vodka. But it was still a
“fantastic result”.
“History has
accelerated,” Orbán crowed at an EU summit in Budapest last week. “The world is
going to change, and change in a quicker way than before. Obviously, it’s a
great chance for Hungary to be in a close partnership and alliance with the
US.”
Hungary’s
illiberal prime minister – and the EU’s disrupter-in-chief, lauded by Trump as
a “very great leader, a very strong man” – was not the only figure on Europe’s
nationalist right to hail the president-elect’s larger-than-expected victory.
Geert
Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand whose Freedom party finished first in
last year’s elections and is the senior partner in the ruling coalition, also
posted his congratulations, jubilantly urging Trump to “never stop, always keep
fighting”.
Italy’s
prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, commended a “historic friendship” which “will
now grow even stronger”, while Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany (AfD)
hailed a defeat for “woke Hollywood”, adding that Trump “is a model for us”.
Europe’s
fast-advancing far-right parties, in power in eight EU member states and
knocking at the doors in more, have long seen in Trump a powerful ally who
shares their populist, nation-first, conservative, Eurosceptic and
immigration-hostile views.
But what can
they actually expect to gain from Trump 2.0? For all their enthusiastic words,
analysts and diplomats say, Europe’s mini-Trumps will probably not get much –
and may even find themselves worse off. What’s more, some appear to realise it.
Certainly,
there may be some political upside to basking in reflected Trumpian glory. “The
coming Trump presidency will most probably embolden Europe’s far right and
illiberal actors,” concluded experts at the Centre for European Reform
thinktank.
“Trump will
strengthen far-right parties not just by normalising and amplifying their
ideas, but by boosting their electability.” His win legitimises their
grievances and rubber-stamps their sovereigntist vision; history seems to be
moving their way.
Besides
Orbán, Meloni, Wilders and Weidel, Europe’s longstanding Trump admirers include
Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (RN), Slovakia’s prime minister Robert
Fico, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.
They may
well be joined after elections next year by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic,
and – with both France and Germany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, weakened
by domestic political crises – their influence is plainly on the rise.
Some experts
argue selected European far-right leaders could be strengthened personally by
Trump’s win: Meloni, for example, has put in the groundwork, praising his brand
of politics as a model for Italy and regularly travelling to his rallies.
Common views
on issues ranging from immigration to abortion, and her flourishing rapport
with Elon Musk, could see her become Trump’s “main interlocutor in Europe”,
said Lorenzo Castellani of Rome’s Luiss University.
Hungary’s
foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, expressed much the same ambition for Orbán.
“We can have a good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will
return to its peak form,” he said: Orbán and Trump have “similar thoughts”.
But the
dynamics are a lot more complicated than that. While Europe’s far-right leaders
may align comfortably with Trump in their hostility to immigration and
international institutions, there are also significant differences.
Meloni’s
staunch support for Nato and continued international aid to Ukraine in its
struggle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, will not be greeted
with enthusiasm by the more isolationist voices in the incoming US
administration.
Similarly,
Orbán’s cosy “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China,
which Hungary has welcomed with open arms as a key economic partner and foreign
investor, is a long way from Trump’s aggressively hardline approach to Beijing.
As US
Republican Mitch McConnell put it, “when Chinese state enterprise says jump,
Hungarian officials ask how high”. Those words “caution against any guarantee
of deeper [US-Hungary] collaboration”, foreign policy expert Zsuzsanna Szelényi
said.
Trump’s
promised America first trade policies could also prove complicated to negotiate
for Europe’s far-right parties. As members of the EU’s single market, they
could not respond individually to US-imposed tariffs and a likely trade war.
Le Pen’s
lukewarm response to Trump’s second triumph – in marked contrast to her joy at
his first in 2016, which she hailed even before he had officially won –
reflects widespread concern over the consequences of Trump 2.0 for EU industry
and jobs.
“Americans
have freely chosen their president,” Le Pen said. “This new political era
should contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations and the pursuit
of constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage.”
Her protege,
Jordan Bardella, even echoed French president Emmanuel Macron, saying that for
“us French and Europeans, this US election should be a wake-up call … an
opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy”.
Far-right
voters in Europe are far from uncritical of Trump’s brand of politics, polls
suggest: a pre-election YouGov poll found, for example, that people who backed
Le Pen would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Trump.
“Trump’s
attitude towards Europe … will be harmful to far-right parties’ core electorate
– think inflation, de-industrialisation, job losses,” said Catherine Fieschi of
the European University Institute. “Trump is bad news for them.”
The idea
that Trump himself “gives a damn about building relationships with these people
strikes me as very very unlikely”, Fieschi added. “He will think about them on
a case-by-case basis, and see whether he can extract something.”
Faced with
the concrete threats to the continent posed by a second Trump presidency that
promises to be even more radical than the first, the EU that Europe’s far-right
parties have so long reviled may start to look a little less unattractive.
Orbán may be
strong at home, said Szelényi, “but Hungary is small, deeply integrated in the
EU, and its people like being Europeans. The country’s progress and success is
far more dependent on the success of the EU than on anything else.”
Like other
far-right leaders, said Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University in Milan,
Orbán has “tried to play both sides, be strategically ambiguous. The thing
about Trump is, he’s not going to let you do that. He’ll force you to make a
choice.”
Europe’s
populists will continue to “say Trumpian things, especially if they have an
election coming up”, De Vries said. “But when push really comes to shove –
Europe’s security in Trump’s hands, Nato not guaranteed – then maybe quite a
few are going to say, maybe we need to work on this in Europe.”
Far from
uniting Europe’s far right in triumph, Trump’s return could actually deepen the
conflicts between them. Ultimately, concluded Fieschi, Trump “is going to make
the lives of Europe’s far-right leaders, as Eurosceptics, a lot harder. They’re
going to be caught between staying Eurosceptic, lining up with Trump and
hurting their base – or lining up with the EU, shedding their specificity and
losing voters. They’ve been ‘out-populist-ed.’”
Additional
reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome
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