Former President Donald Trump and US Republicans are heartened by this weekend’s European Parliament elections, which saw right-wing victories across Europe that shocked France and other countries, potentially portending a US electoral landscape similar to the one that followed Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum that preceded Trump’s US victory that same year.
French people ousted President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party in a vote this weekend, voting more than twice as hard for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally as for Macron’s own party. Macron immediately dissolved parliament and moved to call early general elections in late June with a runoff in July, testing whether the defeat was unique to European elections or a reflection of his actual voters, who are hoping for a new administration for his party, which suffered a major defeat in this weekend’s elections. Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in countries such as Germany and Italy, the right has prevailed, where criticism of mass immigration and other globalist tendencies appears to be growing amid a growing worldwide movement against globalists.
Trump has celebrated the victories of international conservatives and populists over the past few years, and in a Breitbart News exclusive published in January, he said the recent victories of Argentine President Javier Milley and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni were indicative of a growing global movement centered around him.
“This is essentially the MAGA-Trump movement,” Trump said in an interview with Breitbart News. “This is the Trump movement.”
As Breitbart News pointed out in its coverage of the Trump interview at the time, globalist sympathizers Foreign Policy John Kampner of the magazine caveat European Parliament elections and other world elections in 2024 (some already held, others still ongoing) could signal a worldwide rejection of globalism and an embrace of more nationalistic and populist policies and politicians by people across the globe. Kampfner’s biggest fear, that “right-wing populists” will “sweep the West” in 2024, seems to be becoming a reality. “It is quite possible that various far-right forces will emerge as the single largest force,” Kampfner wrote at the time, a prediction that may have underestimated the outcome of that weekend’s European vote.
Analyzing the results this weekend, The New York Times Ringed He said this was a wake-up call for Democrats and noted that President Trump would welcome the news from across the Atlantic.
“The strength of the far-right is expected to reverberate in the United States and embolden allied political forces waiting for former President Donald Trump to return to office,” it said. TimesMatina Stevis-Gridnev writes from Brussels:
It is also interesting to note that Democratic President Joe Biden spent the weekend before the vote in France with President Macron. While many mainstream media figures and political forecasters have carefully avoided making obvious and perhaps harsher comparisons to the electoral victories of the European right or the 2016 UK vote to leave the EU in terms of their predictive power in the US presidential election, some have openly stated that these indications portend big problems looming for Biden.
Matt Mowers, founding director of the EU-US Forum and a former State Department official in the Trump administration who now leads the pro-populist conservative group with other former Trump administration officials, said: statement Late on Sunday night, after the results were announced, he said the message should be sent loud and clear to globalists around the world.
“Tonight’s historic victory for conservative parties across the continent marks the beginning of a new era in Europe where conservative ideas cannot be silenced,” Moise said. “Since March, the EU-US Forum has been exposing the EU’s failed policies and leadership, sending a message across Europe: ‘We want change in the EU.’ Tonight’s results prove that Europeans are ready for conservative leadership and reject the far-left course that EU bureaucrats have built for Europe. From France to Spain to Germany, conservative policies have won. Brussels must now listen loud and clear to its citizens. Enough is enough. Europeans are tired of living as pawns in the pawnshop of the global left-wing elite. We hope that tonight’s victory in the EU elections will send a signal to the world that European and American citizens are tired of the dangerous policies that the far-left has been pushing for years: reckless spending, open borders, unlimited regulation.”
Moise was not alone. Interestingly, Edward Snowden, the infamous whistleblower against the National Security Agency (NSA), posted on Platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that the European Union elections were terrible news for Biden, especially since, in his view, the results were a wholesale rejection of Western continued funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Pro-war politicians have just been severely punished in the EU elections. This does not bode well for Biden. Maybe it’s time to give peace a chance. https://t.co/yk40R3lGM7
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) June 9, 2024
Newsweekon the other hand, Published An entire analysis suggesting that the results in Europe threaten Biden’s hold on power around the world. “Joe Biden’s Ukraine Coalition Faces Liquidation” was the headline of an article by foreign affairs correspondent David Brennan, who argued that ongoing wars and other left-wing and globalist policies are proving unpopular with voters around the world.
“The overall results of this election point to a political climate that favors the right over the left,” Pawel Zerka, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the magazine in response to Brennan’s article.
Le MondeEven the French newspapers Published The blunt headline after the results were announced was “Europeans worried about Trump returning to the White House.”
Meanwhile, Biden himself made a cryptic post on X following the French election results.
Joe Biden tweeted about the “values that are in the soul” of the United States and France, after Macron called for early general elections following major gains by Le Pen’s far-right Rally National party in today’s European elections. https://t.co/gPhMjZURv2
— Rachel Wearmouth (@REWearmouth) June 9, 2024
But far-left advocates who want Biden to win in November worry that the president and Democrats don’t have the full picture and won’t realize it until it’s too late.
Far-right parties have made great gains in the EU elections, evoking moods of Brexit in 2016, just before President Trump was first elected.
The Biden team (and Biden) really need to wake up. We’re in a bad place.
— Randy Perez (@therandyperez) June 9, 2024
National and battleground state polls continue to project the rematch between Biden and Trump coming up in November to be close, with Trump leading in enough battleground states that if these polls are accurate, Trump could manage to muster more than 270 votes, but he would still only have a slim lead. That said, national and battleground state polls seem to be tilting things heavily in Trump’s favor and against Biden’s.
Just this weekend, CBS News release Polls show that majorities of Americans, especially Hispanic voters, support a government program of mass deportations to remove all illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. Trump has said he would implement such a program if re-elected. Additionally, polls on the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East also show a significant departure from the globalist positions on these issues.
61% of Americans say the US should not send weapons to Israel. 77% of Democrats say the US should not send weapons, compared with 38% of Republicans. Though a minority, 38% is still a large number. Republicans have virtually no representation in Congress. pic.twitter.com/SgiB3HRDWg
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 9, 2024
These figures are absolutely incredible and show how out of touch the so-called “democratic” leaders of the Western countries are with their people on the Ukraine issue.
This is a study compiled by the Institute for Global Affairs. @Eurasia Groupone of America’s leading political risk firms. pic.twitter.com/snZAaAOPNR
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 7, 2024
So the big question is whether these European elections really represent a worldwide backlash against globalism, like Brexit in 2016, and whether Trump can exploit such a backlash to return to the White House, as he did then, or whether these are one-off events specific to Europeans’ views of the European Parliament. Of course, Macron is rushing to prove it’s the latter in these elections, but Trump and international populist leaders are hoping it’s the former, a long-term global voter shift against the globalists that conservatives have been hoping for for years. Only time will tell what happens next.
