TRUMP-STYLE POPULISM RISING IN EUROPE
Trump-Style Populism Is Rising in Europe
In Britain, France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, voters are rejecting the establishment’s nihilism.
By Gerard Baker September 8, 2025Something is stirring in Europe. Its leaders continue to talk in private about Donald Trump with a mixture of contempt and fear while publicly feigning respect and deference. But the people they claim to lead are starting to sound more like the U.S. president. European elites have worked hard to stamp out any sparks across the Atlantic from the Trumpian fire. But in Europe now it feels like the underbrush is smoldering.
In the U.K., where the counterrevolution against globalism was launched with the Brexit vote in June 2016, the mood is sulfurous. Nigel Farage, Britain’s Donald Trump, who was in Washington last week getting flayed by Democrats on Capitol Hill and embraced by his friend in the White House, is now the ascendant figure in the nation’s politics. His Reform UK party, which didn’t exist a decade ago, leads the clueless governing Labour Party by around 10 points in opinion polls. This weekend they held their annual convention in Birmingham, the heart of Middle England. It had something of the look and feel of a concert by a Trump tribute band. “Make Britain Great Again” baseball hats—in understated British teal, not gaudy American crimson—flew off the shelves. Like MAGA gatherings, there was a fair helping of fruitcake: One doctor told delegates Covid vaccinations might have been a “significant factor” in the recent diagnoses of cancer among two members of the royal family.
But the faces and voices were authentic and powerful—and familiar to anyone who’s been to a Trump rally: regular citizens, tired of the arrogant uniparty in power the last decade, tired of being told what to think by the establishment about immigration, multiculturalism, transgenderism. Above all tired of losing their country, its traditions and values to those who despise them.
In France, yet another centrist government has fallen. Parliament ousted President Emmanuel Macron’s handpicked prime minister, François Bayrou, by a 364-194 vote Monday. His replacement will be France’s fourth prime minister in a year. The presidential election is still 18 months away, and God alone knows how many more governments there will be before then. But the chaos is only clearing the path for the party treated as pariahs by the media. Marine Le Pen, barred from office by a dubious prosecution last year reminiscent of some of the lawfare against Mr. Trump, may be forced out of the race. But the designated successor of her National Rally party, 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, is a fresh face who has worked with her to detoxify the brand, dispelling its old stench of antisemitism and Nazi-adjacent ideology.
Speaking of detoxifying brands, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is about to mark her third anniversary as prime minister, a feat of FDR-like longevity in that country. Her Brothers of Italy party’s roots lie in Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement. But she has skilfully steered an unwieldy coalition towards stable populism, elevating traditional Christian values and pushing hard against uncontrolled immigration.
In Germany another uniparty coalition is striving to address rising popular anger. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made some commendable steps, such as getting his compatriots to accept a greater share of the burden for their defense. But he is hamstrung by dependence on the Social Democrats, and grinding through the gears of Teutonic stasis, his government is losing ground to the Alternative for Germany, which the established parties have stigmatized.
What’s stirring in Europe is the same rejection of the establishment’s cultural nihilism that moved enough voters in America to make Mr. Trump president twice.
Immigration is out of control in the U.K.; three million arrivals in the past five years in a country of 66 million. The social consequences are startling: from hotels in leafy, peaceful English towns crammed full of refugees, to a London student body that is one-third Muslim. Similar challenges are overwhelming France, Germany and Italy. Their economies are crushed by the weight of fiscal incontinence and sky-high energy prices caused in part by delusional green extremism.
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