FILE PHOTO: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump greets Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk during a rally the day before Trump is scheduled to be inaugurated for a second term, in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies aren't shy about praising far-right figures around the world.
"War Room" host Steve Bannon and Tesla/SpaceX leader Elon Musk openly praise France's Marine LePen and the National Rally (formerly the National Front) party. Trump, Project 2025 and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are avid admirers of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is a staunch defender of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has defended many times.
But in an op-ed published by The Guardian on April 4, Nathalie Tocci — who heads the Institute for International Affairs (l'Istituto Affari Internazionali) in Rome — argues that Trump's economic policies are a major slap in the face to the "far-right parties" in Europe that he claims to support.
"Donald Trump has unleashed a trade war on the world, and Europe, considered by Washington to be among the 'worst offenders,' is a major target," Tocci explains. "After hitting European steel, aluminum and cars, this week Trump announced sweeping 20 percent tariffs on almost all EU imports. Europeans have seen this coming for a long time. Well before his reelection, officials in Brussels were drawing up plans on how the EU might respond to Trump 2.0 and a possible transatlantic trade war."
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Tocci continues, "What might the political fallout in Europe be? The good news is that Trump's trade war puts Trump-friendly far-right forces in Europe in a terribly uncomfortable position."
Trump, for the most part, is not popular in Europe — where he is often criticized not only by liberals and progressives but also traditional conservatives. However, far-right pseudo-populists like Le Pen and Orbán are allies of the MAGA movement.
"It's one thing for the European far right to support Trump in principle, or to support the (Trump) Administration's tyranny over peoples it doesn’t care about, be it Ukrainians, Canadians, Mexicans or Palestinians," Tocci stresses. "It's quite another to defend Trump and his policies when the victims are countries that these far-right parties supposedly represent."
According to Tocci, "far-right leaders in Europe" have "adopted two approaches" when it comes to Trump's economic policies.
"The most populist among them have remained as obsequious as ever. Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League Party in Italy, claimed that Trump's tariffs represented an 'opportunity' for Italian business, without specifying why and how," Tocci observes. "Most other far-right leaders, however, are on the back foot, aware that they are damned if they speak in favor of Trump and damned if they don't."
Nathalie Tocci's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.