J.D. Vance met Alice Weidel, the co-chair of Germany’s far right AfD, in February in Munich

EA on NDTV and BBC: Trump and Musk Back UK Far Right’s Quest for Power

At the UN General Assembly in late September, Donald Trump launched a tirade against Europe’s governments.

I’m the President of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe, I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration, that double-
tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.

This is not just Trumpian rhetoric. When Trump claimed Europe is in “serious trouble”, he told leaders to be more like him by adopting virulently anti-immigrant policies. This is the Trump camp allying itself with far-right politicians and parties across the continent.

Trump’s UN speech coincided with the release of a joint report by the European Council on Foreign Relations and European Cultural Foundation over his administration’s interference in European elections. The authors concluded that divisions, hesitations, and a “flatter, appease, distract” approach to Trump have only encouraged the Trumpist activists, who are exploiting polarization in societies.

The far right has stalked liberals for at least a decade, but Trump’s second term has normalized what once seemed radical. Extreme positions gain legitimacy, be they on migration, Islam, climate, or minority and women’s rights. Trump’s orbit is the critical infrastructure — conferences, media ecosystems, funders and ideological avant-gardes — that supports the formation of a “MAGA internationale”.

The New Alliances

The Trump Administration has moved away from a rules-based order and post-1945 partnerships to disorder and new alliances.

At his second-term inauguration, Trump hosted hard-right politicians and activists from around the globe and Europe, including the leadership of Germany’s AfD, Tino Chrupalla and Beatrix von Storch.

Von Storch had maintained contact with Trump’s allies in the years between the two terms, regularly meeting Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. He took a page from the Trumpist book to depict center-left opponents as “radical left lunatics”.

Last month Von Storch visited the White House to discuss democratic participation and election procedures in Germany. Representatives of the National Security Council, the Vice President’s office, and the State Department attended the meeting.

The episode was the latest in the strategy unveiled by Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February. Dismissing America’s traditional allies, he called on Berlin to end its exclusion of the AfD and to work with the far right. Declining to see Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vance instead met AFD leader Alice Weidel.

Scholz responded on social media, “From the experience of National Socialism, the democratic parties in Germany have a common consensus: this is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties.”

The Hard Right’s Emergence

In Europe’s three largest economies, the UK, France, and Germany, hard-right parties are topping the polls for the first time in modern history. The UK’s Reform, France’s National Rally, and the AfD have been backed by Trump and his administration.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has worked for Trump since the 2016 US Presidential campaign, becoming the first British politician — rather than Prime Minister Theresa May — to be welcomed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago after the November election. At a Reform rally earlier this year, Farage proclaimed that Trump’s ascendancy should “serve as an inspiration”.

In April, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds and barred from running in elections for the next five years, Trump went on a tirade: “It is the same ‘playbook’ that was used against me by a group of Lunatics and Losers.”

The Trump-backed AfD explained in an internal memorandum, “Our goal is to create a situation in which the political divide no longer runs between the AfD and the other political currents, but rather one in which a bourgeois-conservative camp and a radicalizing left-wing camp face each other, comparable to the situation in the US.” The tactics would create a “duel between two irreconcilably opposed camps.”

The Trump Administration, nationalist and portrayed by some as isolationist, has an internationalist approach to empowering and promoting their counterparts in Europe. They have embraced the call of the leader of Spain’s Vox Party, Santiago Abascal, at a gathering of the far right’s senior politicians: “We have to reach out permanently to our allies in Europe.”

The Case of the AfD

In December, weeks after after the US elections, Elon Musk declared that the AfD was “the only force that could ‘save'” Germany.

Chancellor Scholz reacted, “He supports the extreme right throughout Europe, in Britain, in Germany, in many, many other countries, and that is something that is completely unacceptable.”

But Musk pressed ahead, with a surprise video appearance at a campaign launch rally for the AfD in January. AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla, fresh from his appearance at Trump’s inauguration, said Trump “implemented his election promises….That’s what I call politics for the people.”

In the federal elections in February, the AfD moved into second place, doubling their vote from the previous election, and becoming the main opposition in the German Parliament.

Matthais Quent, a specialist on extremism, explains the significance of Trump for the AfD: “To see the biggest power in the world has a far-right leadership, this tells them, ‘Okay, we can achieve this goal as well.’”

AfD co-chair Weidel keeps a red baseball cap, inscribed Make Germany Great Again on display in her office. The Trump Administration, she says, “feel that something is severely going wrong in Germany.” With their help, she will set it right.

When the German domestic intelligence labelled AfD as “right-wing extremist”, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the designation and called for it to be reconsidered.

The German Foreign Office responded:

This decision is the result of a thorough independent investigation to protect our Constitution and the rule of law. Independent courts will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.

After he became Chancellor in May, Friedrich Merz criticized the “absurd observations” from the US, and said he “would like to encourage the American government…to largely stay out of” German domestic politics.

The Trump Administration took no heed, inviting the AfD’s Von Storch to the White House last month.

Merz says he has always felt that America “can clearly distinguish between extremist parties and parties of the political center.” His problem is that this does not apply to the Administration, as they align themselves with like-minded hard right factions.

Can Europe Respond?

Europe is facing the Trumpist desire to trample on norms and make new alliances. Doing so, the Administration is breaking with the past US practice of not interfering in domestic European politics.

In its report on the situation, the European Council on Foreign Relations argues that the European Union is showing a lack of vigor and robustness in its dealings with Trump, even as sentiment for European unity rises across the bloc. There is enough pro-European strength for the EU to stand up and “defend a Europe that writes its own script”.

The Trump embrace of the hard right means the defense of that unity cannot be deferred. The cabal in Washington is intent on reversing the progress of the second half of the 20th century, including the creation of the European Economic Community and then the EU, and replacing it with the rise of authoritarian rule.

Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany after World War II and a founding father of what would become the EU, said, “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”

In the Trump era, Europe is at one of those historic moments.