20.02.2025

Making Europe Great Again

Riding high in the polls and brimming with confidence, the far right is being actively promoted by the US state - as JD Vance made clear in Munich, writes Eddie Ford

Though it may horrify many, the post-World War II international architecture is being rapidly dismantled, as the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Donald Trump’s aggressively assertive administration is serving as a spur for the far right everywhere - Europe being no exception. Once, the continent was dominated by the consensus politics of social democracy on the ‘centre left’ and Christian democracy on the ‘centre right’. Nor was the UK fundamentally any different, at least from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The phrase ‘Butskellism’ summed up the closeness of the two main parties (Hugh Gaitskell was Labour chancellor and Rab Butler his Tory successor).

The post-World War II consensus was actively promoted by the US state department in the Cold War drive to ‘contain communism’. Concessions were conceded, full employment and rising wages were cynically celebrated. However, last week, US vice-president JD Vance, speaking in Munich, introduced Europe to a very different Washington consensus. Those in attendance seemed to be genuinely shocked by what they heard. Why? Haven’t they been keeping up with the news? Haven’t they listened to anything Trump has been saying?

“There is a new sheriff in town.” Vance declared, going on to say that “democracy will not survive if their people’s concerns are deemed invalid or, even worse, not worth being considered”. By this he meant that Europe’s “threat from within” is graver than that posed by Russia and China, criticising the cancellation of a recent election in Romania, the prosecution of an anti-abortion protestor in the UK, media censorship, political correctness and wokeness.

Going further, Vance openly questioned whether Europe was even worth defending and blasted policies which allowed mass migration. Throwing fuel on the fire, he directly connected immigration policies to an attack in Munich the previous day that injured 36 people: “We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” he said, and if you are afraid of “the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people”, then “there is nothing America can do for you”. Nor “is there anything you can do for the American people”.

What particularly dismayed liberal commentators was the fact that Vance pissed upon the supposed ‘firewall’ that has long been used to separate the liberal mainstream from a far right which has organisational and ideological associations with fascism - eg, Alternative für Deutschland.

In an act full of symbolism, the US vice-president met for 30 minutes the AfD leader, Alice Weidel - not the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party, nor the leaders of Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union, the Free Democratic Party or the Greens. They reportedly discussed the war in Ukraine, German domestic politics and the ‘firewall’.

That Munich meeting was not the first between the party and a figure close to the Trump administration, of course. Now leading a DOGE purge of the US federal government that involves sacking nuclear safety employees, Elon Musk praised the virtues of the AfD last month after its election launch when he hosted Wiedel in a 75-minute live conversation on X. In a rambling session that covered Douglas Adams, Schopenhauer, the meaning of life and whether Adolf Hitler was a communist, the billionaire claimed that “only the AfD can save Germany”.

Even if the numbers do not appear to add up at the moment, a CDU/AfD coalition is clearly no longer taboo in Washington.

Tornado

Showing how emboldened the far right feels was a Make Europe Great Again rally on February 8 in Madrid, attended by around 2,000 select people and hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox party - a devoted gathering of those who bask in the cult of Trump. You had all the big names you would expect, such as Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, the charming Geert Wilders, who once compared The Koran to Mein Kampf, former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and Herbert Kickl of the Freedom Party of Austria. Prior to the event, leaders met behind closed doors with special guest Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation - the rightwing think tank behind the plans of Project 2025 to dismantle large parts of the federal government and remove checks on executive power, as part of its agenda to elevate Trump into the position of an autocratic monarch.

The rally also acted as the first official summit of Patriots for Europe, which was formed in May last year and became the European parliament’s third largest voting bloc, with 86 MEPs. It does have to be said that PfE’s stated goal of ‘uniting the right’ across Europe has not been entirely successful. AfD, Poland’s Law and Justice, and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy have not joined - nor have broadly similar groupings in Slovakia and Slovenia. Interestingly, France’s National Rally objected to AfD joining because of a statement saying that any former SS member was not “automatically a criminal”, though it appears that there were other tensions as well.¹ Maybe some things are still beyond the pale, but do not expect that to last for too long.

At the rally itself a jubilant Viktor Orbán said the “Trump tornado” has “changed the world in just a few weeks”, declaring that “yesterday we were heretics; today we’re mainstream”. Well, perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that today we are heretics and tomorrow we will be mainstream - but who is going to split hairs when amongst your ranks there is a prime minister and a deputy prime minister?

Everyone skewered the “liberal fascists” who want to replace Christian civilisation with “a sick Satanic utopia” and “the creeps” who want to “turn our children into trans-freaks”. Marine Le Pen got excited by the idea that “we are facing a real tipping point” with which the European Union “seems to be stupefied” (which has a certain point) and Wilders warmed to his favourite themes by declaring that “we refuse to bend our knee to the extremist agenda of the woke left” and “refuse to surrender to the guilt tripping of multiculturalism” - celebrating Trump’s declaration that the US will recognise only two genders that cannot be changed.²

Kickl argued that “people everywhere are rising against the impositions of the EU centralists and leftwing ideologies” - wanting a new model of European cooperation based on “national sovereignty”- and Petr Macinka from Czechia’s ‘Motorists for Themselves’ party hankered for a “return to realistic policies based on a free market and strong nation-states”. And “only patriots can make Europe great again”, not liberals, progressives, socialists or anyone who believed in wokeness.

An overarching (if not obsessive) theme of the Madrid rally was making the continent a beacon again for Christianity and resisting the “invasion” of Muslim immigrants. In other words, a white Christian civilisation has been smothered by what some think is the intentional ethnic replacement of native-born Europeans - a favourite topic of conspiracy theorists - or a “genocide by substitution”, even if no-one actually used that phrase at the rally.

One after the other, speakers vowed to “reconquer” Europe from the forces of socialism and liberalism - building explicit parallels to Spain’s Reconquista, the time when Christian kingdoms reconquered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rulers, the Moors, which finally ended in 1492 with the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.³

Reconquest

Muslim migrants, woke liberals, cultural Marxists, climate change fanatics and trans rights activists - are today’s invaders. Orbán and others said the Reconquista was an example of “the spirit” Europe needed today if it was to restore ‘greatness’. Now we are dealing with an agenda of not only erecting new borders and keeping people out, but actually expelling undesirables who are already here.

Strangely enough, nobody at the rally mentioned the fact that the popular hero, El Cid, whose name is very much associated with the Reconquista (played, of course, by Charlton Heston in the famous movie of the same name) had at one part of his career actually fought for Muslim rulers, while the most celebrated achievement of his career - the conquest of the kingdom-city of Valencia - was actually achieved in close alliance with the Banu Hud and other Muslim dynasties. Another thing nobody mentioned was that the final expulsion of the Moors went hand-in-hand with the expulsion of the Jews. Mythology is so much more comforting than actual history.

Reform UK

Also feeling full of optimism for the future is Nigel Farage, even if he is not totally in sync with the Trump administration by resisting the calls from Elon Musk to embrace Tommy Robinson, who the tech billionaire obviously regards as a martyr who can ‘save Britain’ - just as Alice Weidel can ‘save Germany’. But watch this space.

Farage must seriously imagine replicating the success of Trump. The most recent poll by YouGov, for example, has Reform on 27%, up one point from the week before, with the others unchanged - Labour 25%, Tories 21%, Liberal Democrats 14%, and the Greens 9%.⁴ No wonder he boasted in an interview with The London Standard that there is a “35% chance” that he will be prime minister by 2029, while also promising to rid Reform of “lunatics and maniacs”.⁵ He fears Robinson and his fascist mates are vote losers.

But Farage too glorifies “Judeo-Christian culture” that apparently underpins western civilisation - even telling a recent conference of rightwing activists in London, the ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’, that its values were at the root of “everything” in Britain. Perhaps his most interesting comment was that the right in Britain is “not split”, because “the Conservative Party is not on the right in any measurable way” - mainly because it has permitted record levels of legal mass immigration ever since Brexit - even if a desperate-sounding Kemi Badenoch is now saying that western civilisation “will be lost” if the Tory Party fails, which can only mean that we are all doomed.

While respectable liberal opinion may be gnashing its teeth at the rise of the far right, the undeniable truth is that such forces are attracting increasing support because of the obvious failures of mainstream politics to provide any hope for people alienated by the endless lies and deceit. People are not fools and cannot be duped for ever, and the only answer that Sir Keir Starmer appears to have is to ape the policies and programme of Nigel Farage - even to the point of launching a series of Facebook adverts in Reform style, boasting about deportations.⁶ But that will only build up support for Reform, as there is no point bothering with a copy when you can have the real thing.