Since Donald Trump descended that escalator and ushered in a new geopolitical age, eleven years ago, the United States and Europe have each been conducting a similar—if not identical—conversation about the future of their politics and their societies. As an upstart Republican challenger, Trump set himself on course for the Presidency by importing wholesale the language and the animus of the European far right, grandstanding over the threat of Syrian refugees and Muslim migration by drawing on security fears that had little to do with the realities of the United States. He saw the British vote for Brexitin 2016—a thumb in the eye of an overweening liberal establishment—as a boon for his own incipient political movement. His victory in 2024 was celebrated by fellow-travellers across the Atlantic as a harbinger of things to come; his second term has dovetailed with a surge in support for European far-right parties, some of which want to carry out Trump-style campaigns of mass deportations. In early 2025, Spain’s far-right Vox party convened a gathering of European ultranationalists under the banner of “Make Europe Great Again.” It included some factions that either were already in power or seemed on the precipice of winning it. “Yesterday, we were the heretics; today, we’re mainstream,” then Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced. “People thought we represented the past; today, everyone sees that we are the future.”
In fact, everyone did not. Orbán’s tenure is, of course, now in the past. He was defeated resoundingly in an election earlier this year by a Hungarian opposition committed to unravelling his illiberal, autocratic legacy. The European leader whom Steve Bannon once described as “Trump before Trump” can model for the lame-duck President what it’s like to be out of office, and his ideological allies elsewhere have recalibrated their positions. Even before last week, when the U.S. midterm elections delivered a historic rebuke to Trump’s project, some in the vanguard of Europe’s new right—including the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen—were keeping their distance from him, aware of his profound unpopularity among Europeans and the ways in which their nationalist ambitions were better served untethered from MAGA’s gravitational pull. And their ascension proceeds: in France, rolling social unrest and a sputtering economy may catapult Le Pen and her party into power next spring, and, in the United Kingdom, an economic malaise compounded by anti-migrant xenophobia may cause the Labour Party to suffer major losses in local elections next year. Meanwhile, Germany’s AfDa far-right party classified as an extremist organization by the country’s own domestic-intelligence agency, is already the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament; it could be poised to take power in an eastern German state by the end of this year, and is, state by state, growing at the expense of the increasingly unpopular center-right Christian Democrats and center-left Social Democrats, who are jointly running the country in a coalition government.
Then, there’s Spain, where Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, currently Europe’s longest-serving center-left leader, gambled on a snap election later this month in an attempt to strengthen his fragile coalition. Opinion polls still show right-wing parties favored to form the next government, after eight years of Sánchez’s leadership and a damaging set of corruption scandals involving figures within the Prime Minister’s inner circle. But after the Democratic Party scored its biggest series of congressional wins in half a century, Sánchez and his allies are feeling encouraged. Their platform centers on implementing significant progressive reforms to alleviate the country’s housing crisis, and they hope their compatriots will see events in Spain on a continuum with the recent victory of Brazil’s leftist incumbent President and the Democrats’ overwhelming popular mandate. After years of keeping right-wing populism at bay in Spain, they see themselves marshalling a left-wing populist response.
In a phone call last week, José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, talked to me about his world view, which, he said, “puts forward dialogue and coöperation,” and “respect for international law.” It’s a vision in line with that of the new Democrats arriving in Washington, such as Michigan’s senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who has said that the United States “should be the first among equals to enforce international law.” Albares noted that the victorious progressives in the United States and Brazil focussed on addressing economic inequity and hardship (“the things that matter to the people”), a belief that redistribution has to accompany economic growth, and an explicit embrace of the diversity of their countries. The Democrats, after all, won on platforms that promised to bring down prices, tackle corruption, reckon with inequality, expand health-care access, reject nativism, and take on the wealthiest of the élites. They are, arguably, America’s true populists. “The winners are people that really think that there is a place for everybody in the society, and that everyone needs equal opportunities,” Albares told me. The alternative, he said, would be to “scapegoat” migrants as his party’s rivals on the right have done, and return to “the law of the jungle,” where “the strong can impose their will on the weakest.”
Source: www.newyorker.com
