Another erstwhile American ally felt the Trump effect last week in a big way.
In an upset similar to Canada’s recent election, Australia voted for the incumbent Labor party against the Trump-like right-winger who led the polls in the run-up to Election Day. (In both cases, the conservative candidate even lost his own seat in the parliament.) Germany, too, just a couple of months ago, managed to beat back the far-right AfD party after Elon Musk and JD Vance stuck their noses in the campaign on its behalf.
Something is happening among America’s allies, and it’s a tremendous relief. For some years now, we’ve seen the MAGA-infused global right gaining a foothold amongst western democracies, largely driven by the same demagogic, nationalist, pseudo-populism that has fueled Donald Trump’s dominance on the American right. Some countries like Hungary have served as a sort of experiment for the kind of post-democratic autocracies dreamt of by the modern right wing in which government co-opts, intimidates and de-legitimizes the political opposition to create an authoritarianism that dominates the culture and the politics without a lot of overt violence. But the rise of the far right among the Western allies seems to be stalling out.
The rise of the far right among the Western allies seems to be stalling out.
The American right during the Trump years has been dazzled by the possibilities of creating a Christian nationalist/tech-utopia (depending on who you talk to). So they have joined forces to destroy their common enemy: the American constitutional framework, the rule of law and the government safety net, all of which they loosely define as “the left.” They managed to win the last presidential election and form a majority in the legislature and are now busily enacting their agenda. It’s an ugly, depressing spectacle for all the world to see, but America has no one to blame but itself.
However, nobody else in the world signed on for what Donald Trump and his Republican henchmen are up to, and the countries most like us are making that very clear to their leadership. They have to. Whether anyone likes it or not, the U.S. is still the most powerful nation on the planet with massive economic clout, military might and a heavy influence on the global institutions it helped build over the past 80 years. Unfortunately, we have decided to put all that in the hands of an aging, incompetent, narcissistic demagogue, and having inexplicably done it twice, we lost the trust of sane people everywhere.
People in other countries have good reason to be hostile to the United States. Our president is a very unbalanced person who is awash in resentment over things that are not true and problems that don’t exist. His relationship with the rest of the world is based solely on the idea that everyone is “ripping off” America and taking advantage. He’s uneducated about history, so he doesn’t realize that it was America that built the system he rails against. We did so to create a stable world order that might prevent another catastrophe like the two horrific wars of the 20th century.
That system may be fraying at the edges, and it may be time to create a new system of global security, but what Trump is doing is making everyone unsafe. By threatening to invade sovereign nations, treating foreigners in our country like criminals and seeking to dominate the world economically through his daft tariff scheme, he is making the United States into a pariah nation.
The Canadian people were ready to elect a conservative government after 10 years of Liberal Party leadership that had run its course. Incumbents have been being thrown out of high office at a record pace ever since the pandemic so it seemed like par for the course. But after Donald Trump took office and decided to treat our closest neighbor, ally and trading partner like an enemy, insisting that the U.S. should annex it and make it into the 51st state, they turned on the Trumpish conservative party and elected the new leader of the Liberals who promised to resist Trump and his hostile aggression. The Canadian conservatives realized too late that the 2025 Donald Trump model is a dud.
It was a very similar story in Australia. They, too, saw what was happening with Trump and decided they wanted someone who would fight Trumpism, not emulate it. Again, the conservatives chose a defective model and the Australian voters made it clear that they didn’t want any part of it.
Germany voted a little bit earlier and people hadn’t yet seen the full effect of Trump and his belligerent attempt to dominate the world economically or his ineptitude in dealing with the Ukraine-Russia war. But they were able to see Trump’s animosity toward NATO and they watched as his surrogates JD Vance and Elon Musk each made totally inappropriate forays into the election campaign to endorse the AfD, a far-right neo-fascist party that had been gaining in popularity. The AfD underperformed expectations in the election so the center-right leadership remained in control.
Just last week the German Intelligence service designated the party a “far-right extremist organization,” which, because of Germany’s past experience with the most notorious far-right extremist party in history, carries a heavy legal burden in that country that allows the government to use surveillance powers to keep tabs on it.
In a stunning display of obnoxious presumptuousness, the secretary of state and the vice president of the United States decided they needed to weigh in on that decision:
I guess I'm showing my age but not all that long ago this would have been unthinkable. It truly is a shocking development in establishment GOP ideology. Do they understand what they are saying?
Rubio’s post garnered this reply:
I won’t even address the hypocrisy of anyone in the Trump administration lecturing others about democracy and tyranny. My God.
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Despite Vance’s assertion that the AfD is the most popular party in the country, it’s only in one poll that it came in one point on top, and it’s important to remember that Germany is a parliamentary system with many parties so it’s actually the favorite of only 25% of the population. (Even in the East, only 35% support it.)
Most Germans do not have a problem with what the government did:
According to a representative survey conducted by the polling institute INSA for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper this weekend, 61% of Germans agreed with the categorization of the AfD by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) as “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor,” with 48% supporting a ban. Thirty-seven percent said they would oppose a ban; 15% said they didn’t know.
It is horrifying that the Republican establishment is now openly endorsing such a party or weighing in publicly on social media about it at all. Germany is a sovereign country and it has a long and painful history that the American right used to understand but apparently no longer does.
The good news is that all around the world, democracies are rejecting Trumpism and vowing to protect their sovereignty. If only America had done the same last November, we’d all be better off.
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