Trump Proving a Mixed Blessing for Europe’s Populist Allies, Analysis Finds

On 3 April 2025, POLITICO Europe pub­lished an opin­ion piece exam­in­ing how for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump’s return to pow­er is cre­at­ing dilem­mas for his pop­ulist allies across Europe. The arti­cle begins:

U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his ide­o­log­i­cal allies in Europe are con­fi­dent the future is on their side — that they can surf an his­toric wave car­ry­ing away all that came before and reshape the land­scape. They hold that faith as stead­fast­ly as Karl Marx held his about the inflex­i­ble “law of his­to­ry” lead­ing to a work­ers’ par­adise. But should they? It’s easy to see why they think it is all inevitable: In the U.S., Trump pulled off a deci­sive elec­toral vic­to­ry, win­ning the pop­u­lar vote and brush­ing the Democ­rats aside in all swing states. Now MAGA is ram­pant; Trump and his best bud­dy Elon Musk are demol­ish­ing gov­ern­ment agen­cies; and Con­gress has so far let them. The courts are hold­ing for now, but for how much longer? Mean­while, on this side of the Atlantic, right-wing pop­ulists and nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives made seri­ous inroads in last summer’s Euro­pean election…

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Key Points:

• Euro­pean pop­ulist lead­ers face a dilem­ma: sup­port Trump and risk domes­tic back­lash, or crit­i­cize him and poten­tial­ly face his wrath and harm­ful policies.
• West­ern Euro­pean pop­ulists are dis­tanc­ing them­selves from Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, with lead­ers in Den­mark, Swe­den and France con­demn­ing his treat­ment of Zelenskyy.
• East­ern Euro­pean pop­ulists, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Hun­gary, where Orbán open­ly sup­ports both Trump and Putin, main­tain stronger align­ment with the Trump administration.
• The author sug­gests Trump’s dis­rup­tive approach could back­fire as many Euro­peans turned to pop­ulism seek­ing sta­bil­i­ty rather than rev­o­lu­tion­ary change.

On 19 March, GIOR report­ed on an Atlantic analy­sis con­clud­ing that recent ten­sions between Pres­i­dent Trump and main­stream Euro­pean lead­ers reflect a deep­er ide­o­log­i­cal con­flict over Enlight­en­ment val­ues that is divid­ing both continents.

The Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA) is an ide­o­log­i­cal coali­tion unit­ing right-wing and far-right move­ments world­wide under shared prin­ci­ples of nation­al sov­er­eign­ty, cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, and oppo­si­tion to glob­al insti­tu­tions. It rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant shift in U.S. con­ser­vatism, mov­ing away from Rea­gan-era ideals of free mar­kets and glob­al lead­er­ship toward a more nation­al­ist and pro­tec­tion­ist agen­da. The GNCA has gained promi­nence through events like the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ences, which bring togeth­er Euro­pean far-right lead­ers, Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives, and oth­er glob­al fig­ures to advance a shared ide­ol­o­gy and strength­en transna­tion­al ties. Many of Don­ald Trump’s appointees have attend­ed these con­fer­ences, under­scor­ing the alliance’s grow­ing influ­ence in U.S. politics.

For a list of world­wide GNCA polit­i­cal par­ties, go here.

For a GIOR analy­sis of GNCA posi­tions, go here.

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real-world” photography.