hen U.S. troops arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, there was considerable confusion about the “freedom” they had in mind for the continent and beyond.

In the early fall of 1944, the Martinique-born novelist René Maran, the first Black winner of the prestigious literary award the Prix Goncourt, was enjoying a glass of wine with his white wife in Paris when five American soldiers “jostled him out of his chair,” wrote the African American journalist Roi Ottley, to whom Maran recounted the incident. “Then they rained insult and abuse on his wife for being in the company of a Negro.” It was barely a month after the city had been ostensibly liberated from German control, which Maran had survived for four years. “Maran is bewildered,” wrote Ottley. “Because this never happened during the Nazi occupation.”

From a European standpoint, the racism articulated by Donald Trump over the past decade has felt both familiar and foreign, making his most recent election victory both painful and predictable. Familiar and predictable because the xenophobia and bigotry; pronouncements about minorities that are either ahistorical, antihistorical, factless, facetious, or farcical; and embrace of a populist, corporatist nationalism are proving effective on both sides of the Atlantic. Foreign and painful because the particular targets, methods, sophistry, and strategy are specific to the United States, and the impact of his victory will be felt all over the world.

As quintessentially American and idiosyncratic as Trump’s affect may appear, we have seen his likes before in Italy in the form of the late Silvio Berlusconi, another sexually incontinent predator and corporate, opportunist bigot with implausible hair who spent too much time at the tanning salon despite being in constant legal jeopardy. Berlusconi, a media mogul and at one point the wealthiest man in Italy, was prime minister for nine years between 1994 and 2011; he died in 2023. Populist and popular, he was too oleaginous for any dirt to stick, elected to the European Parliament and the Italian Senate even after he had been convicted of tax fraud.

Berlusconi seemed one of a kind, and his star was in descent when Trump won the first time in 2016. That victory was a shock to Europe — though less so to Britain, which had just narrowly voted to leave the European Union a few months earlier — mostly for the same reason it surprised so many in the United States: The polls and received wisdom suggested that a man that brash, brazen, crude, and incoherent could not possibly win.

This time, Trump’s victory felt more plausible because we have seen so many of his kind rise in this part of the world. A neofascist, Giorgia Meloni, is in power in Italy; the far-right Viktor Orbán continues to lead the government in Hungary; the party of Geert Wilders, who branded Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture,” topped the polls and entered government in the Netherlands; and the far right polled second in both Sweden and Finland in 2023. By the time the U.S. voted in 2024, the far right had surged in elections in Portugal, Croatia, Belgium, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and Romania, where populist parties gained between 9.5 percent and 18 percent of the vote — a significant tally in electoral systems with proportional representation. In France, the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was thwarted only through deft, strategic electoral intervention on the left; in Austria, the Freedom Party topped the poll with about 29 percent of the vote. Most recently, in February, Germany’s Alternative for Germany came in second, with more than 20 percent of the vote.

Europe and the U.S. have taken different paths to get to this point because their histories of migration, race, and class are different. European nations have an easier job of imagining themselves as monocultural entities without racial histories than the United States does for two reasons. First, their most egregious anti-Black racism and most effective antiracist movements took place primarily abroad, in their various empires, making deniability more plausible, ignorance about where they have been and what they did when they were there more widespread, and the legacies of cultures of resistance more remote. (A Colonial Office survey from 1948, when Britain ruled over much of Africa and the Caribbean, found that half of Britons could not name a single one of its colonies.)

Second, compared to the U.S., people of color have been in Europe in significant numbers for far less time, and their numbers, while substantial, remain relatively small. In England and Wales (as one entity) and in France, the two countries in Europe believed to be the most racially diverse, the proportion of nonwhite inhabitants stands at 18.3 percent and roughly 15 percent, respectively; in the U.S., it is more than double that.

Muslims also make up a larger proportion of those minorities than in the U.S. In most countries, Islam is the most popular religion among people of color. This has made Islamophobia a far more central component in the European far right’s demonization of minorities, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees than it is in America. It has also lent many liberals cover as they cloak their bigotry in rhetoric trumpeting the defense of women’s rights and even gay rights. In 2010, Wilders’s Party for Freedom won a plurality of the gay white male vote. And in some cases — particularly in Germany, thanks to Sahra Wagenknecht’s spinoff party BSW — they are fusing support for statist welfare interventions and opposition to neoliberal globalization with anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies.

Finally, with most of Europe (apart from the United Kingdom) operating a proportional representation electoral system in which seats are distributed according to the number of votes cast for each party rather than winner take all, similar politics can produce quite different outcomes, for better and for worse. Racism has played a significant but by no means solitary role in this far-right insurgency, although its impact has varied from country to country. “Race,” the celebrated late Jamaican British intellectual Stuart Hall once wrote, “is more like a language, than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted.” Globally, it is a language with many dialects. There is nowhere it is not spoken; in most places it is easily recognizable, but in each place it is spoken somewhat differently, with its inflections and idioms shaped by the economic, political, and cultural context in which it is expressed.

So the casting of the scapegoats shifts according to the terrain and can differ in the U.S. The Roma are the primary target in Eastern Europe, Algerians in France, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain, alongside a growing tide of antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and deep skepticism toward the European Union across the board.

But no matter the actors, the narrative is fairly consistent and will be instantly recognizable to anyone following the MAGA movement. When it comes to sites of moral panic about undocumented migrants breaching the national fort, the U.S. has the Rio Grande, Southern Europe has the Mediterranean, and Britain has the English Channel. The far right mobilizes fear of the outside world in the form of aggressive nationalism and xenophobia. Their message goes: 

Borders are being assailed by the world’s poor, who are coming to drive down your wages, riddle your neighborhoods with crime, and undermine your patriotic integrity. And the nation is unable to tackle this onslaught because it is being undermined from the inside by overly generous welfare schemes that make the wrong people lazy and entitled, too rigorous regulations that make business inefficient, and civil rights policies that protect minorities while dividing and censoring people.

 The languages may vary, but the basic message remains the same: 

The other parties don’t care about you; the economy isn’t working for you; the cultural elite look down on you

. On both sides of the Atlantic, an aggrieved, besieged, and belligerent sense of whiteness and national identity, beset by economic insecurity, stagnant wages, social immobility, and fear of terrorism, has been leveraged to considerable electoral effect. In some cases the far right — as in the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom — has taken over the established conservative parties. But in most countries, where proportional representation facilitates the process, relatively new parties are rivaling or even eclipsing the established right.

his time around, Trump’s victory did not so much undermine our understanding of the political challenges we face as it confirmed them in three particular ways. First, just as Trump followed both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the far right’s rise has been facilitated by the inability of the establishment parties of the left or right to deliver for the broad swath of people who feel that their lives are getting worse. Much of the electoral base of these right-wing parties is a coalition of those left behind in postindustrial hellscapes and the middle and upper classes in rural and suburban areas who fear the cosmopolitan chaos of the cities.

This is most evident in Britain and Germany, where center and center-left governments’ inability or refusal to redistribute wealth, reinvigorate the economy, and establish a plausible narrative for how we got to this point and how we might get out is fertilizing the ground for the growth of the far right. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party won what has been called a loveless landslide in July 2024 with a low turnout, netting 5.7 percent fewer votes than when Jeremy Corbyn was leading the party from the left in 2019 in Labour’s worst election performance in more than eight decades. Within a few weeks, we saw white riots as far-right protesters targeted mosques and asylum seekers’ shelters after a mentally ill Black teenager who was neither Muslim nor an asylum seeker ran amok at a children’s dance class, stabbing three children to death and leaving another 10 people injured. Just over six months later, polling shows the far-right Reform UK party narrowly outpolling both Conservatives and Labour, potentially going from 5 to 76 seats in Parliament. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer started the year with an approval rating of −41 and a plurality of Britons saying they were pessimistic about the year ahead.

President Donald Trump meets with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office, Feb. 28, 2025. Photograph by Brian Snyder/Reuters/Redux.

Second, just as Trump’s advance coincided with and then outlasted the growth of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy, the rise in the far right has generally mirrored an electoral collapse on the hard left, which enjoyed its own less impactful but nonetheless significant insurgency a decade ago. Back in 2014, for example, in the East German state of Thuringia, Die Linke (the Left Party, a reconstituted version of the former Communist Party) came in second with 28 percent of the vote, compared to the far-right AfD, which placed fourth with 11 percent. In September 2024, the AfD placed first with 33 percent and Die Linke came fourth with 13 percent, after the anti-immigrant BSW with nearly 16 percent. For the most part, these left parties campaigned on economically populist platforms but eschewed much of the hard work of antiracist education and international solidarity for fear that it would alienate their bases. Now that the right is ascendant, their left counterparts have thus far mostly failed to unite around a coherent strategic response beyond large demonstrations. Die Linke started to turn this around late in the 2025 campaign after a barnstorming parliamentary intervention from one of its leaders. Heidi Reichinnek’s speech, which ended with the rallying cry “To the barricades,” has been viewed more than seven million times on TikTok alone.

Finally, just as we have seen the Republicans in the U.S. who previously distanced themselves from Trump, including Vice President JD Vance, cave to his demands, so in Europe we are seeing the center-right parties break a pledge lasting for a decade or more never to enter into a coalition with the far right. Seeing partnership with the far right as their only route to power, the center right either has accepted the hard right’s conditional support or entered full-blown pacts, thereby legitimizing right-wing bigotry and embedding it at the heart of the electoral process. On the continent that brought you colonial terror, world war, and concentration camps, fascism is once again a mainstream ideology.

n 1964, less than a month before he signed the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson warned the Greek ambassador to Washington, D.C., that any more talk about a threat to Greek sovereignty over the governance of Cyprus in the midst of a territorial dispute with Turkey would incur his wrath: “Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good.” He added, “We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”

Even in the best of times, the United States has held little to no respect for the democratic traditions of others. And these are not the best of times. Trump’s victory did not simply extend a trend that was already underway in Europe. Thanks to the scale of American military, diplomatic, and economic power, his ascendancy will amplify, accelerate, further embolden, and legitimize it. The Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has spent much time in the U.S. since Trump’s election and was toasted as the “next prime minister of Great Britain” at an inauguration ball where he was a guest of honor. Elon Musk has endorsed the AfD and is contemplating funding Reform UK. Trump name-checked Orbán in his one 2024 debate. Whatever misanthropic pathologies he has in store for undocumented migrants and vindictive policies he has planned to target diversity, the trans community, and climate justice will be watched closely by his ideological cousins in Europe. They will look to see not only what is most effective but also how their own governments react.

The U.S. has the power to push even the more robust European economies, only just emerging from the hangover of Covid-19, back into recession, and to punish almost any individual state that might seek to hold it to account for its international obligations. So if and when some governments decide to oppose Trump’s agenda on the international stage, they will be challenged not only by Trump but also by his allies within their own parliaments.

At this stage, there are two main sources of hope for Europe. First, while American power should not be underestimated, it can be overstated. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Guinea, Chile, Cameroon, Angola, France, Mexico, Germany, Russia, and China all withstood significant U.S. and U.K. pressure on the United Nations Security Council and refused to endorse military intervention against Saddam Hussein’s regime. And when the U.S. Army went to Iraq, it discovered the war was no cakewalk and would ultimately find itself defeated, as would later be the case in Afghanistan.

Trump’s saber-rattling — toward China, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, the E.U., South Africa, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Colombia, and Venezuela (and we’re still only in the first months!) — may well prove counterproductive, ending up uniting significant blocs of the world against him for the sake of their own self-preservation. This is effectively what is happening over Ukraine as I write, with European states coming together both to counter his proposals and to elaborate a new solution. Trump’s entire political career has been fueled by anxiety over the joint decline of the U.S.’s geopolitical power and white America’s relative demographics. He has no viable long-term plan to stop either of those trends, and in the likely event that he overplays his hand on the international stage, his presidency may well act as a catalyst to hasten the first. His peevish, vengeful, and solipsistic demeanor tends to make enemies out of even the closest allies. And it is difficult to see how his prideful European counterparts remain faithful to his cause when he is advocating tariffs and other sanctions that will impoverish their bases and humiliate their countries. Steve Bannon’s apparent Nazi salute was too much even for the French far right, whose leader consequently canceled his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the U.S. In Spain, the far-right Vox’s jihad against gays and abortions misjudged the electorate’s desire for a more stable economy and stalled its progress just as Trump’s emphasis on identitarian assaults — DEI, pronouns at the end of emails, etc. — may also prove misplaced.

But we cannot simply rely on them to make mistakes, not least because their implosion could lead to even greater cynicism, despair, and reaction. We saw some elements of what an effective electoral resistance might look like in France. There the left managed to rally Communists, Ecologists, and center-left socialists into a broad popular front for the first round of voting in July 2024. Running on a manifesto of overturning President Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal reforms, imposing price freezes on essential food and utilities, and increasing the minimum wage by 14 percent and housing assistance by 10 percent, the New Popular Front coalition performed far better than any of them would separately. In the second round, which includes the top two candidates from the first round along with any other candidate that receives 12.5 percent of the eligible vote, they made an electoral pact with the center to withdraw in favor of whichever candidate was best positioned to beat Le Pen’s National Rally in order to maximize the antifascist vote. The agreement proved incredibly effective in terms of defeating the far right, which was widely tipped to win, but the broader coalition could not cobble together a majority even though it topped the poll in both rounds. Still, this nonsectarian popular front approach at the ballot box, combined with an electoral program that promised clear material benefits to working-class people, managed to interrupt the rise of the far right even if it could not reverse it.

Trump’s victory has given the far right across the globe confidence to further its interests and an alliance with the nation with the largest military and economy, making the world a less safe and more volatile place. The agenda of misanthropy and terror to which he is devoted is not unique to him or to the U.S., but he has the power to affect the world in a way that none of his European allies do. In February in Madrid, Le Pen, Wilders, and other representatives of the far right gathered under the banner of “Make Europe Great Again.” None of that is inevitable; some of it can be defeated. But that will take a level of sophistication and confidence on the left that is urgent, enduring, and, at present, rare, and will demand a response that is as global as the problems that produced it.

Donald Trump and the Far-Right Insurgency in Europe

It’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison. Head Start and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. But regular people are providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need.

Hammer&Hope

SIGN UP

Gary Younge

@garyyounge

Contributions

Issue

6

Donald Trump and the Far-Right Insurgency in Europe

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY

SIGN UP

Gary Younge

@garyyounge

Contributions

Issue

6

Donald Trump and the Far-Right Insurgency in Europe

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY