U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term has inspired visions of a global alliance of the far right, but his return to power has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the European faction. National interests concerning trade and territory on both sides of the Atlantic have already been colliding. Trump’s expansionism and transactionalism have rattled the euroskeptics.
J.D. Vance’s speech on Friday at the Munich Security Conference confirmed that the Trump administration’s worldview broadly matches that of his ideological kin in Europe. Both largely oppose Muslim immigrants, push back against pro-climate policy, and target the rights of members of the LGBTQ community.
Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire friend, advisor, and the owner of X (formerly Twitter), is also boosting the European far right’s discourse and visibility. Last month, Musk livestreamed a conversation with Alice Weidel—the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—in the run-up to elections scheduled in the country for late February. Musk has also called for the release of imprisoned British far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and offered to pay some of Yaxley-Lennon’s legal fees.
And yet, despite the many commonalities, there are also differences. For one, Trump’s imperialistic ambitions have upset not just the centrists, but also those further right.
“He is using exactly the same arguments to gather control over Greenland as [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin has used to attack Ukraine,” said former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the center-right Venstre party during an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN.
It wasn’t just the mainstream politicians who took offense to Trump’s threats to invade Greenland—a protectorate of Denmark, which is a European Union member—but also members of the populist far-right Danish People’s Party.
“Greenland has been a part of the Danish kingdom for 800 years,” said Anders Vistisen, a member of the Danish People’s Party, during remarks made in late January on the floor of the European Parliament. “Let me put it in words you might understand: Mr. Trump, fuck off.”
There are many other issues that have made the European far right wary of Trump—including his demand that NATO allies spend at least 5 percent of their national GDPs on defense in exchange for continued U.S. presence in the grouping as well as and his unclear Ukraine policy.
But most of all, Trump’s threats to impose blanket tariffs have unnerved Europeans across the political spectrum. Trump is trying to divide Europeans as various far-right groups and leaders compete for his attention, seeing him as an influential advocate of the so-called culture wars that they are waging. But the threat of tariffs as high as 25 percent on certain goods and countries has made it hard for them to openly align with Trump and sing his praises.
If Trump carries out his threat to impose tariffs on the 27-member EU bloc and other European countries—such as the United Kingdom, which he has described as “out of line”—he could wipe out billions in earnings. Some reports estimate that a 10 percent tariff on all European imports could erode Europe’s GDP by up to 1.5 percent, or 260 billion euros ($270.3 billion), and hurt various sectors, including cars, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverages.
Many workers in the German automobile and French agricultural industries are supporters of their countries’ far-right parties, and will likely suffer in this scenario. Both parties have made huge inroads among the working classes as social services have declined. If these parties were to back Trump now, experts say, it would amount to betraying the disaffected voters whose causes the far-right claims to be championing.
“Ultimately, higher tariffs would burden the economy—especially manufacturing,” said Zsuzsanna Vegh, a program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Far-right parties typically advocate for the protection of the national economy. Measures that would or would be seen to adversely impact national economic actors would be perceived negatively by the far right base and, hence, the respective far right parties.”
“If your position is that you want to protect your country and its economy and those who work for your country’s economy, then backing Trump would seem like a contradiction,” Vegh added.
The audience at Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January was sprinkled with members of the European far right. Éric Zemmour, a firebrand former French presidential candidate who has been accused of advertising conspiracy theories, was invited, but Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, was left out.
Experts believe that Le Pen has also been trying to distance herself from Trump. Her congratulatory note after his victory was lukewarm and emphasized “constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage,” which some construed as a reference to working with Europe on trade and tariffs.
Le Pen is fixated on becoming France’s next president, and she needs the support of even those who despise Trump in her country. According to a poll conducted by Elabe last year, 8 out of 10 French people surveyed had a bad image of the new U.S. president. That number could grow as even those who may approve of his anti-immigrant views—such as many National Rally supporters—are hit adversely by Trump’s tariffs.
Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s protégé, has indicated that the party has to think of the winemakers and cheese producers who could be affected by potential U.S. tariffs. “We can appreciate the patriotism of Trump without necessarily wanting France to be a vassal to the U.S.,” he said in January during an interview with France 2.
Nicolas Lebourg, a French political scientist, indicated that the differing reactions between Zemmour and Le Pen have highlighted different shades of the European far right and the strife within. He said that while Le Pen has emphasized “the social and interventionist angle of the state” and retreated “from the ethnic conception of nationality,” Zemmour assumes “this ethnicism” when he pushes the “great replacement theory”—a conspiracy theory that claims that ethnic French and other white Western populations are being deliberately demographically replaced by nonwhite immigrants, especially Muslims.
Zemmour’s ideas—including opposition to globalization propagated by multilateral instruments such as NATO—Lebourg argues, are more in sync with Trump’s. Le Pen, meanwhile, is toeing a more moderate line in the far-right universe, more closely aligned in the footsteps of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Trump has described Meloni as a “fantastic woman” who has taken Europe by storm. And yet, even though the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party is seemingly in Trump’s good books, there is no guarantee yet that she will get a concession from him on his defense spending demands, or on his tariff threats. Italy spends 1.5 percent of its national GDP on defense and plans to increase it to barely 2 percent by 2028. Rome is far from the 5 percent mark that Trump expects and equally terrified of Trump’s tariffs.
According to a recent study by Italian news agency ANSA, a hypothetical 10 percent tariff on products imported to the United States would cost the Italian economy a whopping 7 billion euros ($7.3 billion).
Leo Goretti, a foreign-policy expert at the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs, said that currently, the trade balance is significantly in Italy’s favor, with goods worth nearly 70 billion euros exported to the United States and less than half of that imported from there. “But higher tariffs will be a huge problem for Italy,” he told Foreign Policy, “while spending 5 percent on defense is a huge leap from where we are right now.”
Meloni attended Trump’s inauguration, and her party has tried to present her as the best-placed leader to mediate on behalf of Europe, advertising what Goretti described as “a privileged relationship.”
But he isn’t sure if that helps the EU, or even Italy. “The point is whether Meloni can get some kind of exemption for Italy, or not,” Goretti said.
Germany’s AfD faces its own conundrum. On one hand, the party has advertised Musk’s endorsement ahead of the elections. But on the other, it is not only opposed to Trump’s tariffs, but also wants to resume buying Russian gas while Trump has asked for more purchases of U.S. liquified natural gas. AfD has said that it will restart the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which import gas from Russia under the Baltic Sea.
The European far right is flooded with Putin sympathizers, even though both Le Pen and Meloni have had held moderate positions since Ukraine was invaded. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is an ally of Putin and had hoped to open Europe’s doors to him and play peacemaker in the conflict. But he has had to backpedal, since instead of cutting off aid to Ukraine and forcing it to cede territory to Russia as many had suspected, Trump has instead threatened Putin with consequences if he doesn’t end the “ridiculous war.”
Trump hasn’t offered any concrete assurances on Ukraine’s future, but he has spoken to Putin and discussed how to end the conflict. “We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation,” Trump posted. Meanwhile, Orban had to reverse his threat to veto renewal of anti-Russian EU sanctions following Trump’s warning to Putin. Furthermore, some experts say that Orban’s cozy ties with Beijing could irk Washington as Trump pivots to the Asia-Pacific region.
It is possible that the far-right troops in Europe will coalesce around Trump on other issues or use him to expand cultural wars at home. In a show of strength on Feb. 8,various far-right leaders gathered in Madrid under the motto “Make Europe Great Again,” and Orban once again hailed Trump as a friend. “The Trump tornado,” he said, “has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future.”
Orban flatters Trump in the hope of playing a global role and becoming the face of the European far right, while others think that siding with Trump and his favorite tech mogul can beef up their electoral chances and acceptability.
Trump may seek to pursue a “divide and conquer” strategy toward Europe, said Vegh of the German Marshall Fund. And still, different far-right leaders in the bloc may act differently as they factor in their domestic electoral needs. But there is little ideological depth to the far-right project—and on most issues, no unity.
Other than hatred for Islam and opposition to clean energy, these leaders have little in common with each other or with Trump. Moreover, Europe’s populists have no solution to deal with the real challenges that Trump may inflict on the well-being of Europeans, leaving them no choice but to piggyback on the mainstream and its strategy.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has expressed a willingness to increase gas purchases from the United States even though the country is already the second-largest exporter of gas to the EU. In November, von der Leyen said that the EU should bring down Russian gas imports by replacing them with U.S. LNG, “which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices.”
That transactionalism might be the best chance to resolve Europe’s difficulties with Trump. When asked in late January how the EU can avoid tariffs, Trump said: “The one thing they can do quickly is buy our oil and gas.”
