The White House is noisily mobilizing the world’s Far Right

By Andreas Kluth

THE world’s attention this week has been fixated on Donald Trump’s official visit to Britain, with castles and carriages and all the pageantry that delights a leader who views his own presidency as the apotheosis of . Less noticed, but just as telling, has been a simultaneous visit to Washington by Beatrix von Storch.

Beatrix who? You’re forgiven for asking. Von Storch is a far-right German parliamentarian and second-row leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). I met her in Berlin in 2013, when she and the then-newly founded AfD seemed zany but harmless — destined, as other far-right parties in postwar Germany had been, for petty infighting and eventual irrelevance.

That assessment turned out to be dead wrong, though not immediately. For two more years, the AfD followed the old pattern, and by the summer of 2015 was down in the polls and close to collapse, with the original founders — conservative economics professors whose single issue was abolishing the euro — distancing themselves from the far-right nationalists whose following increasingly included neo-Nazis.

Then the refugee crisis began. Suddenly the AfD, like populist parties across Europe, found its raison d’etre: a rejection of alien-looking migrants at first, then of everything and anything that seemed elitist or, in the current parlance (even in German), “woke.”

Austria, right next door, had pioneered this right-wing shift decades earlier. France, Scandinavia, and others were well along the way. Hungary, one country over, had already gone all the way, with Viktor Orban ensconced as an authoritarian strongman. So had Turkey and India, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi were already in power.

In 2016 the dam broke, first with Brexit, then with Trump’s first electoral victory. A year later, the AfD entered Germany’s federal parliament for the first time, and Von Storch left the European parliament to sit in the Bundestag. In the following years, right-wing populists chalked up successes far and wide, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Georgia Meloni in Italy and Robert Fico in Slovakia.

They felt and cultivated an affinity. Trump and other aspiring strongmen studied Orban in particular for pointers about co-opting the judiciary, academia, press, business, and “deep state.” Personal contacts deepened. While in office, Bolsonaro enthusiastically Von Storch, for example. (The Trump administration is now berating Brazil for convicting Bolsonaro of attempting — in 2023, after losing an election — a coup that looked remarkably like something that Trump supporters had tried two years earlier.)

The first Trump administration already committed grave diplomatic faux pas, such as sending a firebrand ambassador, Richard Grenell, to Germany to proselytize for far-right parties across Europe. The second Trump administration then burst all remaining taboos.

In February, Vice-President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference, telling them that the enemy is not Russia but “the threat from within.” Across Europe, Vance claimed as eyebrows went up, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

In particular, Vance railed against the exclusion of the AfD from government (because the centrist parties refuse to form coalitions with it) and against censorship of the party and its supporters (for which there is no evidence). He then met with Alice Weidel, an AfD leader whom Elon Musk, Trump’s sidekick at the time, had already given a global stage with on his X platform.

Such meddling by the superpower and former leader of “” in the democratic processes of its allies is beyond uncouth. It also has historical parallels on the Marxist-Leninist left.¹ Last century’s evanescent Comintern (Communist International) springs to mind, based on the (now bizarre-sounding) idea that the workers of the world were ready to form a transnational alliance against capitalist elites. The stated premise of this new incarnation — I’ll call it the Popintern (Populist International) — is that nationalist White Christians across the West are ready to rise up against sexually and otherwise dysmorphic cosmopolitan elites.

If Trump, Vance and the rest of MAGA paused for a moment of reflection, they’d realize that any Popintern, like the Comintern, can’t and won’t work, and could lead to disaster. You can’t build lasting affinities when everyone involved wants to Make My Nation Great Again and put My Nation First. Just look at the between Trump and Modi.

Nor can you keep glossing over the many other hypocrisies and internal contradictions. From Orban to Trump and the AfD, the far right tends to indulge, if not idolize, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and correspondingly disdains Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.² One of Trump’s leitmotifs is that their war is none of America’s business because the Europeans should step up and pacify it. But Trump’s own Popintern pals are precisely the ones opposing (in the case of the AfD) or blocking (Orban) a tougher and more united European stance against Putin.

So it amounts to a confession of failure and a bitter irony when Trump NATO that he’s finally “ready to do major Sanctions on Russia,” but only when all other NATO countries “STOP BUYING OIL FROM RUSSIA.” Most of the nations that want to contain Putin, such as Germany, have already weaned themselves from most Russian hydrocarbons. The ones that haven’t notably include, you guessed it, those led by Orban, Erdogan, and Fico. Don’t you think Trump would have a discreet word with them if he meant it?

I don’t expect Trump, Vance, or anybody else in their circles to dwell on such contradictions. Not while they’re busy with their domestic culture wars and on lefties.

And so the Popintern keeps mobilizing. That’s what brought Von Storch and another AfD politician this week. They didn’t see Trump or Vance personally, but met with officials on the vice-president’s staff, at the national security council and in the state department.

The likes of Putin should be delighted about such socializing in the West. By contrast, America’s traditional allies, to the extent that they’re struggling both to remain liberal democracies and to deter autocratic aggression, have to worry.

BLOOMBERG OPINION

¹Then again, the so-called in political science says that the extreme left and right are more similar than they’d care to admit.

²Italy’s Georgia Meloni is a welcome exception to this rule, although her deputy prime minister from another populist party on the far right, Matteo Salvini, fits it.