Trump will not discredit Europe’s populist right

Donald Trump has given Europeans every reason to see him as an adversary. His second term has so far been actively hostile to their interests. He has imposed a 15 per cent tariff ceiling on most EU goods, and repeatedly threatens to raise them further. His fixation on buying Greenland is a tangible threat to Danish sovereignty. More recently, as he has taken the United States into a war with Iran with his usual chaotic bluster, he told European allies that they will pay a price for failing to assist in his adventurism.

It was therefore perfectly logical to expect that Trump would become a real liability for Europe’s populist right, and many public commentators have been more than happy to make that prediction. The New York Times argued that Trump had become a liability for Europe’s far right, noting that his threats to European sovereignty had prompted even ideological allies to seek distance. Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic declared that Europe’s far right was “turning on Trump,” with the president’s attempt to influence elections across the Atlantic backfiring. El País ran the blunt headline: “Trump becomes a toxic asset for Europe’s far right.” Politico offered a more considered version of the same thesis: Trump had become an outright liability for Europe’s far right as his threats over Greenland and tariffs forced even his ideological allies to distance themselves.

There is something to all of this, of course. Trump is not popular in Europe. Ordinary voters dislike his personal character, governments do not trust his word, and industries that once found American power selfish but predictable now find it erratic and potentially even dangerous. If you were designing a foreign sponsor for a European nationalist party, you would not start with a president who threatens European businesses, muses about annexing allied territory, and treats NATO as a protection racket.

Yet the leap from “Trump is not great for Europe” to “Trump will therefore discredit the populist right” has been too tidy by half. More than anything, it assumes that what serves as a compelling argument for journalists and think-tankers must also be decisive for voters.

Most Europeans do not see their respective populist parties, whether Reform UK, the National Rally, AfD, Sweden Democrats, or Brothers of Italy, as outposts of Trumpism. They encounter them as home-grown protest vehicles. The issues that have powered their rise — immigration, crime, and runaway inflation and unemployment — are lived realities across the continent. 

A French voter fretting about disorder in Paris, a German voter furious about asylum policy in Saxony, or a British voter enraged by small boats and taxpayer-funded hotels, does not care as much about what Trump might be doing as do the professional and amateur pundits of Europe (even those of the right), swimming as these pundits inevitably are in Anglophone-salted media waters.

The deeper mistake is to confuse ideological kinship with electoral dependence. There is plenty of transatlantic traffic on the political right, but it does not necessarily translate into votes. Gatherings such as CPAC’s European editions in Budapest and Warsaw see European leaders pay homage to Trump, echo his rhetoric, and sometimes stage moments of almost theatrical deference that can look rather undignified, such as delegates singing the US national anthem. Yet despite this, ordinary voters are not joining a transnational movement. They may share enemies, from opaque NGOs to activist judges, but that does not by itself create shared electorates. 

But beyond all of this, Europe’s populist parties had already done much of the necessary work long before Trump returned to office. Most of these parties had been campaigning on immigration, law-and-order, and “sovereigntist” themes for decades, and for long before Trump came onto the political scene.

The real test, therefore, was whether they would subordinate themselves when Trump’s foreign policy began to collide with European sovereignty. The shift has been visible and swift. In February 2025, at Vox’s “Make Europe Great Again” summit in Madrid, leaders including Marine Le Pen, Santiago Abascal and Matteo Salvini still applauded Trump’s return as a civilisational turning point and shrugged off the tariff threat. But within less than a year, the mood had hardened. 

The National Rally in France, which has spent years turning a permanent protest outfit into a plausible party of government, offers the clearest case study of the balancing act, as they know that being cast as the French franchise of an unpredictable American circus would wreck their project. Jordan Bardella has denounced Trump’s “imperial ambitions” in both Greenland and Venezuela as “a direct challenge to the sovereignty of a European country” and urging the European Parliament to suspend the EU-US trade deal; he has also described Trump’s Middle East objectives as “totally erratic.”

The pattern repeats elsewhere, with leaders instinctively protecting their domestic credibility when Trump’s foreign policy collides with national sovereignty. In Britain, Nigel Farage — despite his long personal association with Trump — called tariff threats over Greenland “a very hostile act”, and stated bluntly that “we don’t always agree with the US government and in this case we certainly don’t.”

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni — until recently one of Trump’s closest European interlocutors — told the president directly that imposing tariffs on Europe over the Greenland dispute was “a mistake.” In Germany, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel accused Trump of violating his own campaign promise of non-interference and compared the pressure on Denmark and the intervention in Venezuela to “Putin-style behaviour,” adding that Trump “has to explain that to his own voters.” Even Spain’s Vox, which had cheered Trump’s removal of Nicolás Maduro, remained pointedly silent on the Greenland threats rather than risk endorsing them.

This distancing has, in most cases, coincided with steady support or outright gains for these European parties.

In France, National Rally remains the clear frontrunner for the 2027 presidential race, polling at 34-35 per cent in national voting intention — essentially unchanged from its post-2024 legislative high and comfortably ahead of the fragmented centre and left. In Germany, where Trump is most unpopular, the AfD has extended its lead over the CDU/CSU, climbing from around 21 per cent in the February 2025 federal election to 27-29 per cent in the latest national polls. Reform UK in Britain has surged to 25-27 per cent, leading the field and far outpacing its pre-Trump second-term levels. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy holds steady at 28 per cent. Even Spain’s Vox has edged up to 17-19 per cent in recent polls, its strongest showing in years. 

Across all five countries, domestic grievances continue to drive support, while the supposed Trump association has produced no measurable backlash. The rhetorical pushback appears to have done its job in insulting the parties from any negative “Trump effect”, without any real domestic side-effects.

These movements have a depth and resilience that long predates Trump and will easily outlast him

It must be added that in these cases, sometimes Trump vindicates the populist worldview, albeit ironically. If America behaves brutally, the nationalist conclusion may be not that nationalism has failed, but that liberal internationalism was always a polite fiction. If Washington imposes tariffs, why shouldn’t Europe? If alliances are transactional, why pretend they are sacred? Rather than discrediting hard-sovereigntist thinking, Trump can instead serve to confirm it, albeit in a way that is counterproductive for him.

Trump may embarrass Europe’s populist right. He may force its leaders into awkward contortions and expose the occasional contradiction. But he will not, by himself, discredit it. These movements have a depth and resilience that long predates Trump and will easily outlast him. Their leaders understand this perfectly: they know he is deeply unpopular with their own voters, and they know he is a temporary figure who will be gone from the White House in a few short years. The forces that lifted these parties began much closer to home, and that is where their future will be decided.