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Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has responded to US claims that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” by saying it backs efforts for a nationalist revival on the continent – but other nationalist parties in the EU are far more cautious.
“The AfD is fighting alongside its international friends for a conservative renaissance,” the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, Markus Frohnmaier, said on Wednesday, adding that he would meet Maga Republicans in Washington and New York this week.
The anti-immigration party, which leads nationwide polls, was “building strong partnerships with those forces that advocate national sovereignty, cultural identity and realistic security and migration policies”, Frohnmaier told AFP.
His comments followed the publication on Friday of the latest US national security strategy in which the Trump administration claimed Europe faced cultural collapse due to migration and EU integration and promised tacit support to far-right parties.
Donald Trump doubled down on the analysis in an interview on Tuesday, describing Europe as “weak” and “decaying” and claiming that it was “destroying itself” through immigration and calling some unnamed European leaders “real stupid”.
The strategy document said several EU countries risked becoming “majority non-European” within decades, accusing the EU of “undermining political liberty and sovereignty”, censoring free speech and “suppressing political opposition”.
US policy towards the EU would therefore focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, the document said, hailing the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” as “cause for great optimism”.
Far-right parties such as the AfD, the National Rally (RN) in France and Spain’s Vox have built their electoral campaigns around attacking alleged EU overreach and excessive non-EU migration, sometimes echoing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
The AfD in particular has actively sought closer ties with Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, said last month she expected to host about 40 AfD politicians in the US.
The AfD’s co-leader Tino Chrupalla attended Trump’s second inauguration in January and the tech billionaire Elon Musk, a major Trump donor, campaigned on behalf of the AfD candidate Alice Weidel before German elections in February.
However, other nationalist parties have been more circumspect, aware of polling showing Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe. Most Europeans – including many far-right voters – consider the US president to be a danger to the EU and want a stronger bloc.
Analysts have long noted the difficult challenge that Trump’s policies pose to nationalists in the EU: while they may agree with some of them in principle, Maga is “America first” – while they are “France first”, “Germany first” or “Spain first”.
Even Hungary’s illiberal government, the EU’s most disruptive nationalist force, has refrained from direct comment on the new US strategy, though the country’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said it was “working on a patriotic revolution to make Europe great again”.
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has post-fascist roots and who has long touted her ideological affinities with Trump’s Maga camp, has volunteered merely that she saw “no cracks” in the transatlantic relationship.
While broadly sharing Trump’s vision on migration and the EU, Jordan Bardella, the RN leader, told the Daily Telegraph: “I’m French, so I’m not happy with vassalage, and I don’t need a big brother like Trump to consider the fate of my country.”
To the BBC, he added: “It is true that mass immigration and the laxity of our leaders … are today disrupting the power balance of European societies.”
But the RN has so far been very wary of seeking to cultivate Maga contacts in the way the AfD has. Bardella has previously accused the US of engaging in “economic warfare” and said Trump was “a good thing for Americans, but a bad thing for Europeans”.
