As the FT has noted this morning:
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.
They added:
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 fossil fuels, immigration and gender validated their prescriptions for the EU.
Interestingly, Farage was not there. There is no suggestion that Reform was represented.
The mode was, however, as ugly as might be expected:
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.”
So, racism and hate were on the agenda.
What was not, apparently, mentioned were tariffs or Gaza. I suspect demands to make Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal parts of the USA were also conveniently ignored. Client politicians are not good at criticising their puppeteers.
What is apparent are three things. The first is that the European far right is intent on delivering the same destruction that Trump is.
The second is that fear and intimidation will also be their weapons of choice.
Third, at least we can use Trump to point out the dangers of this.
I could add that there is little comfort in any of this. But it is worth knowing.
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In a sense the refusal to understand how the country’s monetary system really works means the far right are already here in this country both in terms of the following news and the main stream media that publishes it without question:-
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/09/cash-strapped-schools-plan-to-lay-off-teachers-in-blow-to-labours-promise
How exactly Labour do you “grow” a country by underfunding the training of its children and young people?
Suicide of a country by ignorance or deliberate deceit to protect the interests of the rich it matters not!
It’s becoming 1931 all over again.
Well, it is worth knowing because there are so many willing dupes out there who will fall for it I’m afraid, my brother being one of them. It’s not on you know? Even my conversations with strangers bring up an admiration of Trump time and time again.
Why? Because Trump is not silent. We here may not like what he says and does but it counts as something to others. And if he fails or if he backtracks, it does not matter, his supporters will see that he tried to keep his promise to bew awful – and he is.
And all we get is Starmer, behaving like a puppet (which he is) and rolling back on his promises. As for EU, the Euro is the ring that binds them all (well the big boys anyway) and they have been duped into routing money production through the European Central Bank which is now populated with Neo-liberals and captured by them delivering the economic orthodoxy that ends in authoritarianism.
Keep the EU.
Sack the ECB – kick out the neo-lib cells.
Revert to sovereign money management and production.
Well snake-oil sales people aren’t silent. They aren’t because they know they’ll find plenty of dumb listeners and especially ones who don’t want to do detail especially recognising that the the use of tariffs to protect against unfair trading needs phasing in slowly (to avoid abnormal inflation) accompanied by using foreign traders purchase of your treasury bonds to cut taxes on your home based businesses and encourage re-shoring supply lines.
My eldest hadn’t spoken to me since 2019 when he evinced support for Trump, voted for Johnson, and didn’t want to join the police as they weren’t routinely armed. He was drawn to the right in the RAF, seemingly a normal indoctrination in the forces as my ex para marine brother is also fairly right wing in a Labour family. That the fordes have this as normal is scary. I and my leftist politics are apparently ‘toxic’.
I have some experience of that….
These far-right politicians may be grabbing headlines through pliable media outlets, but the reality is they’re still relatively powerless, especially at EU level.
In the Netherlands, despite winning the last election, even a narcisist such as Wilders realised his country would never accept him as PM, so he appointed an civil servant to be the acceptable face of a coalition that still doesn’t command a majority in the senate, so has no guarantee of getting laws passed.
The coalition is already shaky with one major party the NSC in absolute turmoil.
In effect Wilders has the least power of any PM for a long, long time.
Hungary is a small player in Europe and Spain is probably the most left-leaning of the major nations.
The rise of the right is an absolute worry, but they’re not as powerful as many in the media would have us believe.
Our best hope is that Trump fails quickly so that the rest of the world comes to its senses, as happened with Brexit & the EU countries that quickly abandoned any secessionist ambitions they may have had after we so generously showed the way…Incidentally, I noticed an article this morning that suggested that were Trump to annexe Canada (presumably the same would apply Greenland) the US would end up with a ‘liberal super-majority’ permanently depriving the Republicans of power…a pleasing thought, though one that depends on them being allowed votes on a par with other US states….