Can the same thing happen in Europe?

Since Donald Trump descended that escalator and ushered in a new geopolitical age, eleven years ago, the United States and Europe have each been conducting a similar—if not identical—conversation about the future of their politics and their societies. As an upstart Republican challenger, Trump set himself on course for the Presidency by importing wholesale the language and the animus of the European far right, grandstanding over the threat of Syrian refugees and Muslim migration by drawing on security fears that had little to do with the realities of the United States. He saw the British vote for Brexit, in 2016—a thumb in the eye of an overweening liberal establishment—as a boon for his own incipient political movement. His victory in 2024 was celebrated by fellow-travellers across the Atlantic as a harbinger of things to come; his second term has dovetailed with a surge in support for European far-right parties, some of which want to carry out Trump-style campaigns of mass deportations. In early 2025, Spain’s far-right Vox party convened a gathering of European ultranationalists under the banner of “Make Europe Great Again.” It included some factions that either were already in power or seemed on the precipice of winning it. “Yesterday, we were the heretics; today, we’re mainstream,” then Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced. “People thought we represented the past; today, everyone sees that we are the future.”

In fact, everyone did not. Orbán’s tenure is, of course, now in the past. He was defeated resoundingly in an election earlier this year by a Hungarian opposition committed to unravelling his illiberal, autocratic legacy. The European leader whom Steve Bannon once described as “Trump before Trump” can model for the lame-duck President what it’s like to be out of office, and his ideological allies elsewhere have recalibrated their positions. Even before last week, when the U.S. midterm elections delivered a historic rebuke to Trump’s project, some in the vanguard of Europe’s new right—including the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen—were keeping their distance from him, aware of his profound unpopularity among Europeans and the ways in which their nationalist ambitions were better served untethered from MAGA’s gravitational pull. And their ascension proceeds: in France, rolling social unrest and a sputtering economy may catapult Le Pen and her party into power next spring, and, in the United Kingdom, an economic malaise compounded by anti-migrant xenophobia may cause the Labour Party to suffer major losses in local elections next year. Meanwhile, Germany’s AfD, a far-right party classified as an extremist organization by the country’s own domestic-intelligence agency, is already the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament; it could be poised to take power in an eastern German state by the end of this year, and is, state by state, growing at the expense of the increasingly unpopular center-right Christian Democrats and center-left Social Democrats, who are jointly running the country in a coalition government.

Then, there’s Spain, where Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, currently Europe’s longest-serving center-left leader, gambled on a snap election later this month in an attempt to strengthen his fragile coalition. Opinion polls still show right-wing parties favored to form the next government, after eight years of Sánchez’s leadership and a damaging set of corruption scandals involving figures within the Prime Minister’s inner circle. But after the Democratic Party scored its biggest series of congressional wins in half a century, Sánchez and his allies are feeling encouraged. Their platform centers on implementing significant progressive reforms to alleviate the country’s housing crisis, and they hope their compatriots will see events in Spain on a continuum with the recent victory of Brazil’s leftist incumbent President and the Democrats’ overwhelming popular mandate. After years of keeping right-wing populism at bay in Spain, they see themselves marshalling a left-wing populist response.

In a phone call last week, José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, talked to me about his world view, which, he said, “puts forward dialogue and coöperation,” and “respect for international law.” It’s a vision in line with that of the new Democrats arriving in Washington, such as Michigan’s senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who has said that the United States “should be the first among equals to enforce international law.” Albares noted that the victorious progressives in the United States and Brazil focussed on addressing economic inequity and hardship (“the things that matter to the people”), a belief that redistribution has to accompany economic growth, and an explicit embrace of the diversity of their countries. The Democrats, after all, won on platforms that promised to bring down prices, tackle corruption, reckon with inequality, expand health-care access, reject nativism, and take on the wealthiest of the élites. They are, arguably, America’s true populists. “The winners are people that really think that there is a place for everybody in the society, and that everyone needs equal opportunities,” Albares told me. The alternative, he said, would be to “scapegoat” migrants as his party’s rivals on the right have done, and return to “the law of the jungle,” where “the strong can impose their will on the weakest.”

Earlier this year, the political scientists Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee identified two competing strains of populism, in an essay for the Journal of Democracy. There are the populist tendencies that come out of a narrative of political failure—the fury of the AfD over refugee arrivals, the rage of the MAGA base that wanted to “drain the swamp” and who demonized migrants. Then, there’s another tendency, which emerges from a shared sense of economic unfairness and which, as Lee, a professor of government at Harvard, told me, is pluralist in its ethos, “does not scapegoat targeted groups, like immigrants and marginalized minorities,” and puts the blame on big business and billionaires. This, in Lee and Culpepper’s formulation, is “good populism” and that is the populism that prevailed in the United States last week. “You can only go so far in blaming immigrants for your unhappiness before you have to start looking elsewhere,” Lee said. “The sheer scale and astonishing arc of this Tuesday’s elections in America bends in the direction of good populism.” In an interview with the Times, Gina Hinojosa, the governor-elect of Texas, explicitly embraced the tag of “economic populism,” arguing that “this has to be the politics of the moment to meet the challenges of the moment.”

For now, Europe still seems on a different trajectory. Economies like France’s are grappling with a growing public-debt crisis, while Germany’s powerhouse manufacturing industries are facing existential pressure from Chinese competition. Increased military spending is forcing hard conversations about outlays for existing social-safety nets, while, as in the United States, the energy-price shocks triggered by the war in Iran have contributed to spiked inflation. The appeal of nativist culture wars endures, while more establishment parties are being pulled to the right. Germany’s center-right Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has stoked his unpopularity by attempting a raft of reforms and cuts on social spending, including to pensions. Isabella Weber, a German economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of a new book, “Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy,” points to the irony of Germany “turning to old recipes of the nineteen-nineties” with a campaign of austerity and deregulation at a moment when the United States is “the closest we have ever gotten to the Democrats breaking with neoliberalism and market fundamentalism.”

The AfD has gained from dissatisfaction with Merz and his big-tent coalition with the center-left Social Democrats. But, beyond promises to cut benefits for migrants and foreigners, the AfD’s economic program is far from populist; the Party wants to slash corporate taxes and abolish inheritance and wealth taxes. Tellingly, it has become the darling of Elon Musk, whose huge investment on behalf of Republicans this cycle proved ineffectual, and likely fomented a backlash against billionaires’ interfering in U.S. politics. In Germany, though, Musk has been a conspicuous ally of the far-right, urging Germans to move on from their guilt over the Nazi past while sounding alarms about the perils that immigrants supposedly present to white Europeans. These demographic anxieties pervade the Continent and seem to drive political calculations. Some centrists have pointed to the pragmatism of the so-called Danish model—the precedent set by center-left governments in Denmark, in the wake of the 2015 European migration crisis, that remained progressive on many social and economic issues but tacked hard to the right on questions of immigration. That approach kept the center left in power for more than a decade, but it’s no panacea. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats suffered their worst electoral result in more than a century earlier this year, and remain in power thanks only to a four-party minority coalition. As Jan-Werner Müller, a political theorist at Princeton put it, they were unable to check the far-right even as they aped its demagoguery on migrants, while simultaneously losing younger voters, who reject xenophobic politics, to smaller parties on the left. “Never mind morality on any of this, but just electorally, it’s actually not such a great idea,” he told me. After the U.S. midterms, it’s the Democrats now who have a chance to bring Europe into their conversation.