US President Donald Trump’s attempted Greenland grab has driven a wedge between him and some of his ideological allies in Europe, as previously unstinting enthusiasm and admiration collide with one of the far right’s key tenets: National sovereignty.
Trump’s subsequent disparaging remark that NATO allies’ troops “stayed a little off the frontlines” while fighting with US forces in Afghanistan has only deepened the divide, piquing far-right patriotic sentiments and prompting an avalanche of criticism.
The US president last week stepped away from his drive to seize Greenland, pledging that he would not take it by force or impose tariffs on nations opposing him. Faced with a fierce backlash, he also appeared to walk back his swipe at non-US NATO troops.
However, for radical-right populists — who lead or support governments in one-third of the EU’s member states, are vying for power in others and who saw in Trump a powerful ally for their nation-first, anti-immigration, EU-critical cause — he is increasingly a liability.
The divide could jeopardize the goals of his administration’s national security strategy, which set a US policy objective of “cultivating resistance” to Europe’s “current trajectory” by working with “patriotic allies” to avert “civilizational erasure.”
Just over a year ago, Europe’s far-right leaders were effusively welcoming Trump’s return to the White House. A few months later, they gathered in Madrid to applaud his “America first” agenda under the banner “make Europe great again.”
More recently, some have been having second thoughts.
Polling consistently shows Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe. Most Europeans, including many far-right voters, see the US president as a danger to the EU and want a stronger bloc.
Polling published on Tuesday by the Paris-based European affairs debate platform Le Grand Continent suggested that between 18 and 25 percent of far-right voters in France, Germany, Italy and Spain consider Trump as an “enemy of Europe.”
Asked to define his foreign policy, between 29 and 40 percent of supporters of the National Rally (RN), Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), Brothers of Italy and Vox parties chose “recolonization and the predation of global resources.”
Perhaps most remarkably, between 30 and 49 percent of voters for far-right parties in the four countries said that if tensions with the US over Greenland were to increase further, they would support the deployment of European troops to the territory.
Trump’s expansionism, and his willingness to use economic clout to achieve it, puts Europe’s far right in a tough position. Leaders in France, Germany and Italy have all criticized his plans, some sounding very like the mainstream politicians they despise.
In a European parliamentary debate last week, typically pro-Trump, far-right members of the European parliament (MEP) overwhelmingly backed freezing ratification of an EU-US trade deal because they were so uneasy at his approach, calling it “coercion” and “threats to sovereignty.”
MEP Jordan Bardella, RN leader Marine le Pen’s protege and the president of the party, who only weeks ago described Trump as “a wind of freedom,” called the US president’s pledge to seize Greenland “a direct challenge to the sovereignty of a European country.”
He told the debate: “When a US president threatens a European territory using trade pressure, it’s not dialogue, it is coercion.”
Greenland was “a strategic pivot in a world returning to imperial logic,” he said. “Yielding would set a dangerous precedent.”
Normally a fierce critic of alleged EU overreach, Bardella instead urged the bloc to unite and fight back with the toughest weapons in its arsenal.
“This isn’t escalation, it’s self-defense,” he said. “The choice is simple: submission or sovereignty.”
Alice Weidel, a coleader of Germany’s AfD, which had hailed Trump’s national security strategy as the dawn of a “conservative renaissance” in Europe, said in Berlin that the US president had “violated a fundamental campaign promise — not to interfere in other countries.”
Even Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and a Trump loyalist, described as “a very hostile act” a US president “threatening tariffs unless we agree he can take over Greenland ... without even getting the consent of the people of Greenland.”
Wary of retaliation, far-right and populist leaders who are in office rather than bidding for it were not quite so outspoken. Italy’s “Trump-whispering” prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, criticized the deployment of European troops to Greenland, but even she eventually said she had told the US president in a call that his Greenland threats were “a mistake.”
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s illiberal prime minister and perhaps Europe’s leading Trump fan, dodged the question.
“It’s an in-house issue... It’s a NATO issue,” Orban, who has long vaunted his friendship with the US president, said of Trump’s Greenland plans.
Likewise, Poland’s nationalist, Trump-aligned president, Karol Nawrocki, last week said that Greenland tensions should be solved “in a diplomatic way” between Washington and Copenhagen, without recourse to a broader Europe-wide debate.
Nawrocki stressed that the US was still his country’s “very important ally” and he called on western European leaders to tone down their objections to Trump’s conduct.
In the Czech Republic, too, Prime Minister Andrej Babis, warned against a transatlantic row.
However, if some leaders were wary of openly criticizing Trump over Greenland, there was near-universal outrage at the US president’s comments on NATO allies’ troops in Afghanistan, which Meloni described on social media as “unacceptable.”
The Italian prime minister said her country had borne “a cost that cannot be called into question: 53 Italian soldiers killed and more than 700 wounded.”
She said Italy and the US were “bound by a solid friendship,” but that “friendship requires respect.”
Nawrocki said there was no doubt that his country’s soldiers — more than 40 of whom lost their lives in Afghanistan — were heroes.
“They deserve respect and words of gratitude for their service,” he said.
Babis was equally critical.
Fourteen Czech soldiers had died in Afghanistan, the Czech prime minister said, adding that he knew Trump “likes to provoke and doesn’t mince words, but what he said about the mission in Afghanistan was way off the mark.”
Analysts said it was too soon to say if the divide would last.
Daniel Hegedus, of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund, said that domestic electoral considerations meant many far-right parties would be forced to respond to any continued threats to sovereignty.
However, Trump and his European ideological allies “can always unite forces again, around issues where they can cooperate,” such as immigration, he said.
Pawel Zerka, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Affairs, said that far-right leaders would not lose out.
“Far-right leaders in France, Germany and Britain are unlikely to lose points,” Zerka said.
They “demonstrated timely criticism” of Trump’s excesses, while mainstream leaders and the EU “generally failed to display strength, unity and assertiveness.”
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