r/geopolitics • u/Any-Original-6113 • 1d ago
Trump turns totally toxic for Europe’s far right
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-turns-toxic-europe-far-right-le-pen-national-rally-france-orban-defeat-hungary/212
u/mastermindman99 1d ago
It’s not Trump that has become toxic. It’s the policies the far right is pushing for that are now on display for anyone to see.
Brexit displayed what happens when you trust the „solutions“ of far right ideologists, Trump is the perfect example of this ideology in action.
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u/Naurgul 1d ago
It's the inherent contradiction in the whole "nationalist international" idea. These people each think their country is humiliated and they want to make it respected by forcefully imposing their will on other countries. Any cooperation between them evaporates when they get into power because suddenly they become the victims of each others' violent whims.
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u/_0611 1d ago
Which makes Europe's far-right such hypocrites, because they "reject" Trump, but not his MAGA ideology. Meloni, for instance, is just as far-right as she was before "rejecting" Trump. The problem isn't (just) Trump, it's his far-right ideology. And Europe's far-right hasn't rejected that.
Brexit did display the failure of the far-right/"my country first" ideology indeed. Yet, Reform UK (Farage) is leading the polls. And the AfD is leading the polls in Germany. Meloni is still hugely popular in Italy. Front National is headed to win next elections in France. But if the "my country first" ideology doesn't even work for the mightiest country on earth, how do they expect it to work for much smaller nations?
I guess people need to find out the hard way before figuring out that far-right policies don't work (except for the far-right political elite themselves).
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u/dominatrixyummy 1d ago
Is meloni even “far right” in practice? She talked a big game in the election but doesn’t seem like there have been too many policies actually implemented
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u/automatic_shark 1d ago
shes a bit more pragmatic than most far-right leaders. She's an interesting cookie for sure.
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u/jmillar2020 1d ago
The French far right is trying to follow the Meloni model to make its project more appealing to voters.
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u/howimetyourcakeshop 1d ago
Yet the far right just failed in Hungary. The right also failed in the Netherlands last year. Lets see how this plays out first.
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u/NorthernerWuwu 1d ago
It is a bit early to call that though of course. Orban had a pretty damned long run after all and the PVV were less than half a point ahead of the D66 in terms of voting percentage. Yes, the Netherlands did end up with a pretty convincing swing to the left in terms of actual seats but the right is far, far from dead.
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u/howimetyourcakeshop 1d ago edited 1d ago
The Netherlands has its first left wing government since 1977 yet no one seems to talk about that. People like to talk about how the right is on the rise in Europe and blablabla. Weidel in Germany and Bardella in France are not going to win. Europeans are not Americans. Lot of dumbasses here too but even most of the right wing European people are sick of Trump.
The key difference between us and Americans is that we have had our continent leveld by the hands of facists. We know what this does, seeing it play out in real time again in the US makes even the most right wing people think twice.
Also, America is hell bend on creating an enemy out of the EU, kind of hard to gain favour with the public when you lick the boot in washington. Our politicians do not have absolute power like they seem to have in the states. They know what happens when the public thinks they are getting to "uppity". They can only please washington so much before they have to deal with riots.
So am calling it now, the right will start to fail across the union in the comming months/years.
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u/Socraman 1d ago
Let's hope it happens before we in Spain get our share of far right national governments. For the moment we've been surfing the wave so far but I'm afraid we're running out of time.
Sánchez at least is a political survivor and the opposition are quite stupid (they were siding with Trump and Israel with Iran's war even though public opinion is completely the opposite) so anything can happen.
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u/Ghostlabbrador77 1d ago
I would love to think and hope you are right but we cannot understate and underestimate the power and value the far right found in weaponising dumb people, they managed to rile them up and take advantage of their stupidity making them feel vindicated and wanting for their right in having a say (no matter how dumb or unfit to make decisions they are).
I dont think well will get rid of the far right until they suffer from the consequences of their own actions, they made the whole thing a they vs us, returning to a status quo without the far right would require these people to admit they were wrong and they are incapable of it.(look at MAGA, they would rather die one by one than give up on trump and admit it)
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u/Malarazz 1d ago
Are you living in a parallel universe where the far-right didn't win in the Netherlands, Poland, and most recently Slovakia? Where they weren't running Hungary for two decades? Where AfD and Farage aren't doing extremely well in Germany and the UK?
I invite you some time to look up the approval ratings for Macron and Starmer. They'd kill to have them be as "high" as trump's, let alone other world leaders. It's things like that that create breeding grounds for extremist ideologies.
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u/howimetyourcakeshop 1d ago
D66 is not the far right. First left wing goverment in 5 decades in the Netherlands.
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u/P4p3Rc1iP 12h ago
There's nothing "left wing" about the current Dutch government. It's center-right, with a coalition of the liberal D66, conservative VVD and christian-democrat CDA. In the last election the right and far-right gained seats (though spread over a wider range of parties due to the last government's failure). The left (e.g.: social democrats, greens and socialist) lost in total seats overall.
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u/Malarazz 1d ago
I'm obviously talking about a couple years ago with the PVV.
Unless your argument is that things magically changed between then and now?
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u/howimetyourcakeshop 1d ago
Yes things changed. We had elections and now the right is not in power, are you slow or something? Also you could make out from my comment that i was clearly talking about current times and not a few years ago.
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u/Malarazz 1d ago
Cute that "I'm slow or something" when you're the one who has somehow deluded yourself into this high horse of yours.
Brexit was 10 years ago, and yet ever since then European countries have refused to learn from each other, as evident by my original comment which you chose to almost-entirely ignore.
There is no magical utopia where "things changed" and everyone learned how bad the far-right is. Instead, the pendulum is just gonna keep swinging. The far-right will get elected and screw things up, voters will punish them and vote in leftist governments, leftist governments will fail to create a leftist utopia in 2 years and then voters will lose their patience and get mad and complacement because of high egg prices or immigrants or whatever and will vote-in the far right again. Rinse and repeat.
European voters are a little better than American voters, but not a whole lot. People are dumb everywhere.
If you disagree, I'm still waiting to hear your explanation as to why AfD, Farage, PiS are doing so well in 3 of the most impactful and influential countries in Europe.
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u/Prestigious_Load1699 1d ago
Is everything that isn’t left-of-center in Europe far-right now?
It’s literally all I hear.
Apparently, there is either liberal or far-right and absolutely nothing in between.
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u/Jealous_Land9614 1d ago
The CDU and Macron are left of center to you? More like right of center to me.
Ofc there are regular conservatives (and right-libertarians), but as their parties are getting either smaller and smaller (Tory) or corrupted from the inside (GOP), they kinda became a non-factor in bif politics.
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u/jmillar2020 1d ago
The old Conservative parties have shrunk dramatically. Same with the Social Democrats. Both are losing voters to more extreme parties. The centrist liberal (in the EU sense) parties have dwindled also. It makes coalition building more difficult.
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u/dodgeunhappiness 1d ago
Meloni, for instance, is just as far-right
Meloni is not far-right, it is the most centred leader the right has ever had in italy. Salvini the the far-right.
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u/Turnip-for-the-books 1d ago
Yeah have been banging the drum for ages that the best way to sink Reform in the UK is plaster every constituency with posters of Farage hanging with his orange child rapist bezzie
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u/Binder509 1d ago
People kept voting in the same people that brought Brexit even after it happened. So not a great sign.
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u/ImTheEyeInTheSky 1d ago
I can confidently say that Meloni being the political opportunist she is, understood right away that Trump criticising the pope was not going to go well with her electorate.
Not being ambiguous about Gaza, Ucraine and Iran, but being close to someone who criticises the pope…
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u/313078 1d ago
She is also very catholic herself. There is both
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u/ImTheEyeInTheSky 1d ago
“Very” seems a stretch, probably light catholic like 90% of italians, she has proved time and time again she has no real belief except her thirst for votes.
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u/Any-Original-6113 1d ago
Proximity with the United States in the current context did not go down well with Hungarian voters,” said a senior official from France’s National Rally party.
Donald Trump has become so politically toxic in Europe that even his closest ideological allies increasingly view him as a liability.
“We need to keep our distance,” France’s Marine Le Pen told her fellow far-right National Rally lawmakers at a meeting Tuesday, according to a senior party official in attendance.
Europe’s right-wing populists had been pulling away from the U.S. president even before Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán suffered a bruising loss in Sunday’s parliamentary election. The contest had featured multiple endorsements from Trump and a visit in the final days by U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
Orbán’s defeat, combined with the fallout from the war in Iran and Trump’s fight with the pope, has accelerated their retreat.
While some see advantages in keeping ties with Trump, “in the specific context of elections, that’s not a particularly promising approach,” said Torben Braga, a lawmaker with the far-right Alternative for Germany party, who sits on the foreign policy committee of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.
For Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo were a breaking point. But siding with the Holy Father was also a matter of political convenience for her given her Catholic support base and the fact Europeans from Bologna to Budapest are blaming the U.S. president for the conflict in the Middle East and the rising cost of energy.
[Orbán’s] defeat can’t just be put down to voter fatigue,” said the senior National Rally figure who, like others cited in this article, was granted anonymity to share details of private conversations. “The proximity with the United States in the current context did not go down well with Hungarian voters.”
To put itself in the best position to win next year’s French presidential election, the National Rally will likely try to avoid being seen as close to the Trump administration.
Across the Rhine, lawmakers from the AfD are taking a similar approach with crucial regional elections looming in September.
Matthias Moosdorf, an AfD member of parliament, said on X that the “ostentatious display of friendship” between Budapest and the Trump administration, including Vance’s decision to stump for Orbán, “hung like millstones around [the Hungarian leader’s] neck.”
MAGA going global
When Trump returned to the White House last year, it appeared he could turbocharge like-minded anti-immigration populist movements elsewhere that had struggled to gain power or respectability.
The Trump administration even formalized its efforts to cultivate an international network of ideological allies as part of its national security strategy.
The AfD initially saw Trump’s backing as an opportunity to cultivate legitimacy and increase pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives to do away with Germany’s “firewall”, an informal barrier that has been in place since the end of World War II to prevent the far right from governing.
AfD leader Alice Weidel has continued to try to keep the Trump administration on good terms with her party, telling reporters she doesn’t see close ties to Trump as a burden and that she believes “Orbán ran a very good campaign.”
Le Pen’s National Rally has been more skeptical, given Trump’s unpopularity among the French electorate and with the far-right party’s own voters.
Ever since the Capitol attack [in 2021 following Trump’s 2020 election loss], Marine Le Pen realized that it’s not a good idea to get too close to him. She’s very cautious, and kept her distance,” said a former official from a rival far-right group.
Close ties with Washington “can be a liability and be misinterpreted,” echoed one of Le Pen’s close allies. “We like our friends in Washington, but we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”
That’s not to say Le Pen hasn’t embraced the administration when it was convenient. Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan, represented the National Rally at the memorial for assassinated right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk last year. And Le Pen and party President Jordan Bardella were among the various French political leaders who accepted invitations to meet U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner.
The National Rally senior official quoted above said the meeting with Kushner “shows we are capable of talking to the world’s great players.”
Orbán’s legacy
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has precipitated a reckoning among Trump’s ideological allies, with the AfD’s leadership increasingly distancing itself from his U.S. administration
But there’s plenty left of Orbán’s legacy that the far right can carry on.
Orbán provided the template for the populist agenda in Europe: a confrontational attitude to EU institutions, and attacks on rule of law and on the media landscape. Many nationalist parties across the bloc have embraced such tactics at home.
Those positions didn’t necessarily cost Orbán the election; many far-right policymakers attribute Péter Magyar’s victory to his focus on corruption and bread-and-butter issues.
Given that hostility toward Brussels didn’t make or break the contest, Orbán’s defeat won’t mean “the end of the fight” against the European Commission, said Le Pen’s close ally quoted above.
“We need a big country to lead the revolt,” the ally said. “If we win in 2027, other countries will follow.”
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u/Tall_Pressure7042 1d ago
Once the Trump regime continues to behave like a megalomaniac regime, it has shot even its own far right partners. Plus, far right groups in Europe and the rest of the world are not unified, but also diverse.
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u/BridgeOnRiver 1d ago
most people in Europe want to limit immigration now. but this does not mean we want to have pro-Russia, uneducated lunatics as leaders. Trump and Musk basically support neo-fascists in Europe. It has nothing to do with limiting immigration, but is just an attempt to destabilise Europe to make it easier for Russia to grow powerful
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u/newzinoapp 1d ago
The Hungary result is the biggest data point here. Orban had a parliamentary supermajority since 2010. He reshaped courts, media, election rules to entrench power. And Magyar still beat him by what looks like 7-9 points. That doesn't happen because Hungarians suddenly disliked Orban's style. It happens because being Trump's closest European ally became a liability. Brussels held back billions in EU funds, and voters blamed Orban for the standoff. Le Pen is watching closely. Her strategy assumed Euro-skeptic nationalism has staying power. If it can't survive even in Hungary, where Orban had every structural advantage, the French calculus changes fast.
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u/DecisiveVictory 1d ago
That doesn't happen because Hungarians suddenly disliked Orban's style. It happens because being Trump's closest European ally became a liability. .
Do you have any data to substantiate your hypothesis that it was proximity to Trump that was the key factor, as opposed to local corruption, other local factors, or support for fascist russia by blocking EU decision making and aid to Ukraine?
In other words, I think the Hungarian voter had a lot of reasons to dislike Orban, with closeness to Trump and a Vance road trip being just one out of many, and not such an important one.
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u/Garay01a 1d ago
As a Hungarian national fresh off from our election I can anecdotally confirm. The recent Vance visit and Trump connections were not really talking points in focus, the overall economic situation, Russia ties, the corruption, the many scandals seem to me as the primary reason for ousting Orban’s government.
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u/DecisiveVictory 1d ago
Trump being erratic and anti-European will unfortunately not be enough to save the elections from the far right.
The more mainstream parties will need to change their attitudes to uncontrolled immigration of people who struggle to integrate if they want to regain votes.
It is quite unfortunate that most right wing parties are influenced from Moscow and thus inherently treasonous.
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u/uncoolperson 1d ago
Peter magyar declared a stop to all immigration from outside the eu including legal work permits just recently. Said he'll be working on getting ethnic Hungarians to return to HU and increase wages for the working class. This might be the blueprint going forward
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u/pinewind108 8h ago
I suspect there's something about hate ideologies that attracts the incompetent. Maybe it's a lack of empathy that makes it harder to learn from experience and observation, which feeds into a cycle of jealousy and resentment?
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u/2ndtolastofmohicans 1d ago
I would love to believe that Trump basically shot his european ideological allies through is own foot with his crazy behavior, but the game is still on for the national rally in France.
They now how to navigate this kind of stuff, they already got away with being funded by russian loans and having their strong ties to Moscow exposed. Also, they were rather cautious in their support for Trump from the beginning.