A year ago, Trump was the hero of Europe's far right. Not anymore.
By Ishaan Tharoor November 10 at 1:00 AM
A year ago, Western democracies were reeling from the biggest political shock in decades. American voters had just made a reality-TV star the most powerful person in the world. A presidential candidate who had campaigned on a divisive platform cheered on by white nationalists was now going to lead the world’s most venerable democracy. An anti-establishment neophyte would soon be in charge of the American nuclear arsenal. Leading European statesmen struggled to contain their bemusement.
Among those celebrating, though, were members of Europe’s far right. President Trump’s unlikely triumph was, for them, a dramatic repudiation of a liberal status quo they had long reviled. Trump’s right-wing populism was a validation of their own anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ultranationalist agendas. As various far-right parties geared up for a series of national elections in 2017, they hailed Trump as a harbinger of things to come.
“Their world is crumbling,” Florian Philippot, then the vice president of France’s far-right National Front, tweeted a day after Trump’s election win. “Ours is being built.”
Link to tweet
One year later, however, the establishment in Western Europe hasn’t quite crumbled. Far-right parties in the Netherlands, France and Germany won unprecedented vote shares in their countries’ elections, but are no closer to taking power — and are possibly bumping their heads on the ceiling of their political potential. Moreover, the past year has also seen many of the same European politicians who exulted in Trump’s victory now trying to distance themselves from an American president who has become staggeringly unpopular on both sides of the pond.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/10/a-year-ago-trump-was-the-hero-of-europes-far-right-not-anymore/?utm_term=.49d836188527
