Trump turns totally toxic for Europe’s far right

PARIS  — Donald Trump has become so politically toxic in Europe that even his closest ideological allies increasingly view him as a liability.

“We need to keep our distance,” France’s Marine Le Pen told her fellow far-right National Rally lawmakers at a meeting Tuesday, according to a senior party official in attendance.

Europe’s right-wing populists had been pulling away from the U.S. president even before Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán suffered a bruising loss in Sunday’s parliamentary election. The contest had featured multiple endorsements from Trump and a visit in the final days by U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

Orbán’s defeat, combined with the fallout from the war in Iran and Trump’s fight with the pope, has accelerated their retreat.

While some see advantages in keeping ties with Trump, “in the specific context of elections, that’s not a particularly promising approach,” said Torben Braga, a lawmaker with the far-right Alternative for Germany party, who sits on the foreign policy committee of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.

For Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo were a breaking point. But siding with the Holy Father was also a matter of political convenience for her given her Catholic support base and the fact Europeans from Bologna to Budapest are blaming the U.S. president for the conflict in the Middle East and the rising cost of energy.

“[Orbán’s] defeat can’t just be put down to voter fatigue,” said the senior National Rally figure who, like others cited in this article, was granted anonymity to share details of private conversations. “The proximity with the United States in the current context did not go down well with Hungarian voters.”

To put itself in the best position to win next year’s French presidential election, the National Rally will likely try to avoid being seen as close to the Trump administration.

Across the Rhine, lawmakers from the AfD are taking a similar approach with crucial regional elections looming in September.

Matthias Moosdorf, an AfD member of parliament, said on X that the “ostentatious display of friendship” between Budapest and the Trump administration, including Vance’s decision to stump for Orbán, “hung like millstones around [the Hungarian leader’s] neck.”

MAGA going global

When Trump returned to the White House last year, it appeared he could turbocharge like-minded anti-immigration populist movements elsewhere that had struggled to gain power or respectability.

The Trump administration even formalized its efforts to cultivate an international network of ideological allies as part of its national security strategy.

The AfD initially saw Trump’s backing as an opportunity to cultivate legitimacy and increase pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives to do away with Germany’s “firewall”, an informal barrier that has been in place since the end of World War II to prevent the far right from governing.

AfD leader Alice Weidel has continued to try to keep the Trump administration on good terms with her party, telling reporters she doesn’t see close ties to Trump as a burden and that she believes “Orbán ran a very good campaign.”

Le Pen’s National Rally has been more skeptical, given Trump’s unpopularity among the French electorate and with the far-right party’s own voters.

“Ever since the Capitol attack [in 2021 following Trump’s 2020 election loss], Marine Le Pen realized that it’s not a good idea to get too close to him. She’s very cautious, and kept her distance,” said a former official from a rival far-right group.

Close ties with Washington “can be a liability and be misinterpreted,” echoed one of Le Pen’s close allies. “We like our friends in Washington, but we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”

That’s not to say Le Pen hasn’t embraced the administration when it was convenient. Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan, represented the National Rally at the memorial for assassinated right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk last year. And Le Pen and party President Jordan Bardella were among the various French political leaders who accepted invitations to meet U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner.

The National Rally senior official quoted above said the meeting with Kushner “shows we are capable of talking to the world’s great players.”

Orbán’s legacy

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has precipitated a reckoning among Trump’s ideological allies, with the AfD’s leadership increasingly distancing itself from his U.S. administration.

But there’s plenty left of Orbán’s legacy that the far right can carry on.

Orbán provided the template for the populist agenda in Europe: a confrontational attitude to EU institutions, and attacks on rule of law and on the media landscape. Many nationalist parties across the bloc have embraced such tactics at home.

Those positions didn’t necessarily cost Orbán the election; many far-right policymakers attribute Péter Magyar’s victory to his focus on corruption and bread-and-butter issues.

Given that hostility toward Brussels didn’t make or break the contest, Orbán’s defeat won’t mean “the end of the fight” against the European Commission, said Le Pen’s close ally quoted above.

“We need a big country to lead the revolt,” the ally said. “If we win in 2027, other countries will follow.”