Trump becomes a toxic asset for Europe’s far right

When Donald Trump returned to power in early 2025, and he and his supporters intensified their calls in support of Europe’s far right, that message sounded like a blessing within that ideological camp.

“Fantastic,” Tino Chrupalla, co‑chair of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), told EL PAÍS one day after finishing a campaign rally in a town near the German‑Polish border. The German politician had heard, earlier that same day, U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance’s attack on Europe’s elites in a speech in Munich. “I had never heard such a good speech by a foreign politician in Germany,” he said.

Little more than a year later, there is not much left, within these parties, of the euphoria of being Trump’s chosen ones and the privileged allies of the world’s leading power. Over time, that euphoria first turned into discomfort and finally into rejection.

The honeymoon has ended, and there is no more telling example than the clash last week between the U.S. president and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who until recently had been one of his closest allies in Europe. “I thought she had courage, but I was wrong,” Trump complained after Meloni described the U.S. president’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV as “unacceptable.” The Italian prime minister has also distanced herself from Trump’s war in Iran.

The European nationalist right has realized that Trump’s support comes at a cost, as seen in the April 12 elections in Hungary. Vance’s visit during the campaign to support Viktor Orbán, the prime minister and candidate for re-election, didn’t decide the outcome, but “it was a kind of political kiss of death, and it didn’t help,” explains Daniel Hegedüs, deputy director of the Institute for European Policy in Berlin.

And now Chrupalla, the same man who celebrated Vance’s words last February, is directly demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany, citing Spain under Socialist Pedro Sánchez as a model for having said “no” to Trump. “We are a party of peace,” Chrupalla proclaimed a few days ago at a local AfD congress, before criticizing “wars contrary to international law, such as the U.S.-Israeli war” in the Middle East.

“President Trump’s war aims in Iran are totally erratic,” said Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s protégé at the head of France’s National Rally (RN), in a television interview. In 2017, when Trump had just won his first presidential election, Le Pen traveled to Trump Tower in New York, though the magnate did not receive her. A year later, Steve Bannon, Trump’s ideologue and then close adviser, was the star guest at a congress of the French far-right party. That’s over now, and in France, the shift is explained as much by the White House’s policies as by France’s traditional sovereignty and widespread mistrust of Washington. Now Bardella says about the Iranian crisis: “No one can say what the ideological backbone of this war is, a war whose end seems nowhere in sight.”

This is now the prevailing view among parties in Western Europe that not long ago believed Trump’s blessing would help them normalize their image, step out of the corner of ostracized ideologies, and pave their way to power. There are exceptions — some parties find it harder to distance themselves from the White House, such as Spain’s Vox. And Trump and the United States remain too powerful and influential for Europe’s far right to fully renounce an alliance that helps them project themselves as parties of government and which will continue to be useful, depending on the circumstances. But this distancing didn’t happen overnight; it has been brewing for some time and may have permanently altered their relationship with the leader and pioneer of the new global populism.

First came the tariffs, which could hit European industry and the workers and farmers who are a key electoral base for parties like the RN in France. Then came the operation in Venezuela in January and Trump’s idea of ​​taking over Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, a violation of national sovereignty, something that is a red line for many of these parties. And now Iran. Meanwhile, the Trump administration published the National Security Strategy in December. The document encouraged “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” At the time, this seemed like good news for far‑right parties, and having Washington’s backing will never cease to be an asset. Now, that asset has turned toxic

“For populist parties, Trump appears almost as a liability,” notes Dominique Moïsi, special adviser to the French think tank Institut Montaigne. “The image of Trumpian America has deteriorated in Europe. Populist parties relied on the idea that the United States was paving the way by electing a populist president, and that Europe would be next, but now, this idea is being questioned.”

The idea that excessive closeness to Trump can prove counterproductive became clear in Canada and Australia within just a few days, when both countries held elections between late April and early May 2025. In both cases, conservative parties that were more or less aligned with Trumpism began the race with an advantage, and it was — among other factors — the Trump effect that allowed moderate or center‑left candidates, Canada’s Mark Carney and Australia’s Anthony Albanese, to overturn the expected outcome.

The Canadian case became an example closely watched in Europe at every election. The Liberals reversed the polls after the U.S. president threatened to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state of the Union. Support for the frontrunner, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, plummeted. Carney’s emphatic “no” to Trump yielded clear electoral dividends.

Although the effect is not always clear or direct, Trump is on the minds of many voters every time they go to the polls, even far from the United States. Meloni lost the referendum on judicial reform in Italy in March, a result explained in part by “a growing disconnect between her sovereigntist position that has seen her cosying up to President Donald Trump and the economic damage caused by her American ally,” wrote Arturo Varvelli from the European Council on Foreign Relations in a report. When Trump recently threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, his British ally Nigel Farage reacted: “I am quite shocked just to hear that. That is over the top in every single way.”

In the recent Hungarian elections, Orbán — an apostle of illiberal democracy and of European Trumpism, a politician who had woven unusually close ties with the MAGA movement and who received support from prominent figures in the Trump Administration — was defeated. It didn’t work.

“The attention paid by the U.S., particularly by figures like Vance, was more of a distraction than a help, taking away from Fidesz [Orbán’s party] the time it should have spent campaigning directly with voters,” says Frank Füredi, executive director in Brussels of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a think tank and training center within the Orbán orbit.

“While we can’t know for sure whether Trump harmed Orbán — probably not — he certainly didn’t help him, or didn’t help him enough,” says Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome. “Trump’s toxicity is clear,” she adds. “But this can be said not only of the far right in Europe, but also of [German Chancellor] Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union and [British Prime Minister Keir] Starmer’s Labour Party, which tried to befriend Trump, and this has a political cost, and that’s becoming increasingly clear.”

Tocci highlights a fundamental contradiction in the alliances of the global far right: these are nationalist parties whose creed, on paper, is the defense of national sovereignty, yet they find themselves compelled to cooperate with leaders who seek to undermine that sovereignty, such as Trump. By definition, they end up clashing with one another. “The nationalist international,” she says, “has more developed networks than liberals and progressives, but because they are nationalists, they pursue policies that harm one another.”

One of the parties that has most developed these international networks, besides Fidesz in Hungary, is Vox. The Spanish party has forged an alliance with Washington that extends into Latin America, explains Guillermo Fernández-Vázquez, professor at Carlos III University in Madrid and author of Qué hacer con la extrema derecha en Europa. El caso del Frente Nacional (What to Do with the Far Right in Europe: The Case of the National Front). This close relationship distinguishes it from formations like RN in France, and perhaps explains why Vox finds it more difficult to sever ties with the Republican leader.

“It’s as if Vox and the Trump administration had formed a marriage, but an unbalanced one, because Vox is more interested in this than Trump is. Now Vox is handcuffed. It has no room to maneuver, because it’s at the mercy of Trump’s whims,” says Fernández-Vázquez. “I see Vox tied to him and at the same time bewildered because it didn’t expect this conflict, and it puts it in a difficult position.”

Another factor that distinguishes Vox from parties like the RN or AfD is that the Spanish party is weaker in the polls. Although it has served as a junior partner in regional governments, it still trails Spain’s major parties — the conservative Popular Party (PP) and PSOE —, and may not yet see the need to reposition itself or to “de‑Trumpify.” That is not the case for France’s RN, which, according to polling, has a real chance of winning the Élysée in the 2027 presidential election.

In Germany, the AfD is leading in some polls for the still-distant 2029 elections, but it is divided over its relationship with the U.S. One faction, rooted in the territories of the former German Democratic Republic, is more anti-American, anti-liberal, and pro-Russian. Chrupalla, the party’s co-chair who cited Spain as an example in the Iran war, is leading this faction. Another, more pro-American and liberal faction, based in the West, is more closely linked to the MAGA movement and is led by the other co-chair, Alice Weidel, who is now also distancing herself from Trump. “It would be catastrophic,” Weidel said at an internal meeting when the U.S. president demanded NATO assistance in the war, according to the public broadcaster ARD.

“Their proximity to Donald Trump and the U.S. administration, simply because of his erratic, unpredictable, and unsympathetic behavior, can be damaging,” says Hegedüs, from the Institute for European Policy. “But there is another structural aspect,” he adds, alluding to Hungary, “and that is that they went too far with international support, and they are not credible as political forces focused on national interests.”

Dominique Moïsi believes that “if European populism wants to continue advancing, it must distance itself from American populism.” “The U.S. has become so unpopular in Europe that being close to Trump is not a source of legitimacy,” he adds. “In the recent clash between Trump and Meloni,” observes Nathalie Tocci, “she probably anticipated his reaction and must have calculated that it would benefit her if he lashed out at her.” For Trump’s allies in Europe, confronting him today might even be profitable.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition