The fissure came from behind, but now it is a gap. And deep. The severe corrective to Donald Trump's Republicans in the midterm elections further distances the far right from the American president. From a political asset to show off to his electorate, as after his victory against Kamala Harris in 2024 and in the first stages of his second term, the magnate has become a burden, an uncomfortable burden. Due to its waning political pull, even among its own: the setback in conservative bastions such as Texas, Kansas or the deep south of Mississippi, has been tremendous. For his constant criticism of the Europeans, whom he always has between his eyebrows: there are the indiscriminate tariffs. And because, as has been evident in the capitulation of the Hungarian Viktor Orbán and the Serbian Aleksandar Vucic, their explicit support, far from adding, subtracts.
With the republican cataclysm so recent, nobody wants to know anything about a defeated person. A “loser”, in Trump's own usual language. After Tuesday's fiasco, bigger than the polls suspected, the strategy of the European ultras now seems clear: put even more ground in the way with him and blame the setback on the war against Iran, in which he embarked at his own risk and which has skyrocketed the cost of living even more. Finally, separate the setback from its anti-immigrant agenda, from its constant identity, transactional and denialist commitment, where the coincidences are evident.
“There was always some diversity in the responses of the European far right to Trump's second term: some parties, such as the French National Rally, maintained a colder attitude from the beginning, while others, including Vox, were more enthusiastic,” notes Jeremy Cliffe, of the pan-European think tank ECFR.
Although it has grown worse, the distancing began early, when only a few months had passed into Trump's second term. “In the spring of 2025, tariffs already posed a problem for parties that often claim to defend the industrial sectors of their own countries, but the real break came at the beginning of 2026: with Trump's threats against Greenland, condemned by almost all the major parties of the European radical right, and with the war against Iran and the subsequent rise in energy prices,” Cliffe points out by email. “For parties that preach sovereignty and lowering the cost of living, this double blow definitively cooled their relationship with the MAGA world,” he adds, referring to the Make America Great Again movement, on whose back the Republican returned to the White House.
In Italy, the only major European country in which the extreme right is already in power, there are hardly any Trump fans left. It has not happened overnight, because the distancing already began in April, when Giorgia Meloni realized that it was toxic and he began to insult her, but some statements in recent hours have bordered on hilarity. "We have never been Trumpians, please, nor is Meloni a MAGA. We are conservative," said the vice president of the Executive, Minister of Foreign Affairs and leader of Forza Italia, Antonio Tajani. All, despite the fact that he himself was the Italian envoy to the controversial summit of the Gaza Peace Board devised by Trump, which the EU boycotted and which he attended with the red MAGA cap in hand.
Galeazzo Bignami, head of the parliamentary group of Brothers of Italy, Meloni's party, went further: "It was Trump who said that we were no longer his friends." Even Matteo Salvini, vice president of the Government and leader of the League, who wore a red tie when Trump won the elections, now admits that he must have done something wrong. In his party, the most curious statement was made by Igor Iezzi, second in the parliamentary group: “Trump's problem is that he has become too similar to [his predecessor Joe] Biden.”
The Italian prime minister began to distance herself from Trump in March. He saw in the loss of the referendum to reform the judiciary a sign that public opinion – including many of his voters – had tired of his adulation: in January he had said that he deserved his long-awaited Nobel Peace Prize. But the decisive trigger was the Republican leader's attack on the Pope for criticizing the bombings in Iran: the Vatican is always a red line. It took Meloni several hours to react, but in the end he declared his words “unacceptable.” Shortly after, Trump showed his “disappointment” in her and said she had no value. Criticism, and even ridicule, increased in the following months.
They culminated in June when the billionaire mocked her because she had “implored” him to take a photo together at the G-7 summit and she agreed “out of pity.” Meloni got fed up and said that Italy “doesn't implore anyone” and that Trump had made it all up.
In France, with Marine Le Pen closer than ever to the Elysée, the president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, does not see any “relationship” between what happened on Tuesday and the presidential elections next spring in Europe's second largest economy. "All the polls place us as winners; what happens in other countries does not concern me. The voters are sovereign, but we are facing very different contexts," he declared on Wednesday.
Bardella, like much of his European far-right, does not feel concerned by what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Two years ago, however, he celebrated the Republican's victory and the wind of freedom that, according to him, blew across all democracies with his return to the White House. "I am not an American nor do I vote in the United States. We must respect the verdict of the polls. What is clear is that Trump's second term is very different from the first, both in his philosophy and in his foreign policy."
Le Pen's party has always had a particular relationship with Trump and the United States. Its ties to Russia and Le Pen's long-standing closeness to Vladimir Putin have complicated some moves. The vice president of the National Rally, Louis Aliot, in charge of the party's international relations, went further. “Trump is paying dearly for the Iranian adventure,” he explained. The mayor of Perpignan, one of the very few Frenchmen who attended Trump's second inauguration in Washington, believes that voters are now taking a toll on him for his "interventionism abroad." Once again, the message is clear: the fault lies with their interventionism in the Middle East and not with those policies—such as immigration—in which the similarities are obvious.
In Germany, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, more Russophile than Trumpist and who is also leading in the polls, has limited the defeat to Iran. “Trump promised his voters not to pursue an interventionist foreign policy, and his failure to do so has backfired on Republicans.” And in Spain, the Vox candidate, Santiago Abascal, has downplayed the Trump debacle. In the United States, he slipped on Wednesday, the defeat of presidents in the midterm elections is something “common,” and George W. Bush or Bill Clinton have already suffered it. “I am in Ciudad Real and not in Michigan (...), I am not a commentator on other elections,” he added shortly after.
“An important part of the appeal that the 2.0 version of Trump had on the European radical right did not reside solely in affinity, but in the desire to appear on the side of the winners,” summarizes Cliffe. Now, he adds, both the weakening of Trump's power and the realization that his Administration simply cannot help its European political allies as much as they believed or hoped, "have undermined those self-interested reasons for maintaining the relationship."
The amnesia regarding those days when European ultras cheered Trump's every tweet and every step is widespread. Also outside the EU. In the United Kingdom, the histrionic Nigel Farage admitted on Wednesday the “total and absolute defeat” of the Republicans, despite the fact that he himself had predicted shortly before that expectations of a landslide victory for the Democrats were exaggerated. "Many young people who follow all types of right-wing influencers and who supported Trump in 2024 have voted for the Democrats. It has been a forceful punishing vote, largely due to the war, the prolongation of the war in Iran and the price of fuel."
Although the inflation unleashed by that conflict has been key in the blow to the Republicans, the ECFR researcher emphasizes that this factor "does not automatically eliminate the risks faced by the European radical right for having approached Trump" in the past. "Although weakened, he can still take reckless new steps in foreign policy. And both the center and the left can take advantage of this to present his radical right adversaries as lackeys of an out-of-control American president who harms the interests of his voters."
