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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 fossil fuels, 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 history had accelerated. “We are facing a real tipping point,” she said, adding that in response to the profound political change “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 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.
The event brought together the Patriots for Europe group, the third largest in the EU parliament, and was hosted by Santiago Abascal, leader of Spanish far right party Vox.
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 European governments spend more on their own defence to reduce their reliance on the US.
Andrej Babiš, the former Czech prime minister and leader of the ANO party, slammed the EU’s Green Deal policies to combat climate change. Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has pledged a new effort to balance them with economic competitiveness.
Declaring that the green deal was “not reformable”, Babiš said: “In Brussels, they pretend nothing has changed . . . They continue pushing their green deal ideology, as if Europe industry is not shutting down and moving overseas. As if millions of families are not struggling with energy poverty.”
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.