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Europe’s emboldened far right leaders lauded the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tumultuous first weeks back in power as they declared the EU must replicate his policies to safeguard its future.
At a “Make Europe Great Again” rally in Madrid on Saturday, leaders including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italy’s deputy premier Matteo Salvini declared that Trump’s policies on energy, immigration and gender validated their prescriptions for the EU.
“The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks,” Orbán told a gathering of around 2,000 people. “Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream.”
The rally came less than three weeks after Trump took office for a second term and as Europe’s far-right parties ride high on the results of EU elections last year, when they achieved their best ever performance.
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Rassemblement National party, said that since Trump’s election victory the world was seeing history accelerate. “We are facing a real tipping point,” she said, adding that “the EU seems to be stupefied”.
The leaders railed against “uncontrolled” immigration and called for an end to the EU’s push for clean energy, which they said was damaging the bloc’s economy. They also attacked “woke” policies on gender and celebrated Trump’s declaration that the US will recognise only two genders.
Geert Wilders of the Netherlands’ Freedom party said: “We refuse to bend our knee to the extremist agenda of the woke left. And we refuse to surrender to the guilt tripping of multiculturalism.”
“People all over Europe want us to bring back sanity and moral clarity,” he added.
Santiago Abascal, leader of Spanish far right party Vox, hosted the event.
None of the leaders mentioned two Trump moves that are sources of great concern in Europe: his threat to impose tariffs on European goods to rebalance a trade deficit that he has called an “atrocity”, and his plan to expel millions of Palestinians from Gaza.
They also avoided reference to Trump’s demand that Europe spends more on its own defence to reduce its reliance on the US.
Several leaders spoke positively about the Spanish “reconquest” of Muslim-controlled parts of Spain by Christian rulers in the Middle Ages, with Orbán saying it was an example of the spirit Europe needed today.
