BRUSSELS – For European populists, the electoral defeat of President Trump, who has been a symbol of success and a strong supporter, was bad enough. But his refusal to accept defeat and the ensuing violence seems to have damaged the prospects for like-minded leaders across the continent.
“What happened on Capitol Hill after the defeat of Donald Trump is a bad omen for populists,” said Dominique Moïsi, senior analyst at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “It says two things: if you elect them, they don’t leave power easily, and if you elect them, see what they can do to draw popular anger.”
The long day of turmoil, violence and death when Trump supporters invaded the Capitol presented a clear warning to countries like France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland about underestimating the strength of populist anger and the prevalence of conspiracy theories aimed at governments democratic.
Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, said the unrest showed how the populist handbook was based on “us against them and leads to violence”.
“But it is very important to show where populism leads and how it plays with fire,” she added. “When you arouse your supporters with political arguments about us against them, they are not opponents, but enemies that must be combated by all means, and this leads to violence and makes it impossible to grant power.”
How threatening the populists in Europe saw events in the United States can be seen in their reaction: One by one, they distanced themselves from the disturbances or remained silent.
In France, Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally, is expected to launch another significant challenge to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 elections. She was firm in supporting Trump, praising her election and Brexit as precursors to populist success in France and echoed his insistence that the American election was fraudulent and fraudulent. But after the violence, which she said left her “very shocked”, Ms. Le Pen pulled back, condemning “any violent act that seeks to disturb the democratic process”.
As Ms. Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, populist leader of the Italian anti-immigrant League, said: “Violence is never the solution.” In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, a prominent leader of the right-wing party, criticized the attack on the American legislature. With the elections in your country in March, Mr. Wilders wrote on Twitter, “The result of democratic elections must always be respected, whether you win or lose.”
Thierry Baudet, another prominent Dutch populist, has aligned himself with Trump and the anti-vaccination movement and, in the past, has questioned the independence of the judiciary and a “false parliament”.
But, already struggling with anti-Semitic comments and cracks in his party, the Forum for Democracy, Baudet has also had little to say so far.
Still, the Forum for Democracy and the Wilders Freedom Party are likely to get about 20% of the vote in the Dutch elections, said Rem Korteweg, an analyst at the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands.
Even though populist leaders seem shaken by the events in Washington and nervous with more violence at the January 20 inauguration, considerable anxiety remains among traditional politicians about anti-elitist and anti-government political movements in Europe, especially amid confusion and anxiety produced by the coronavirus pandemic.
Capitol Riot Fallout
Janis A. Emmanouilidis, director of studies at the European Policy Center in Brussels, said there was no uniform European populism. The various movements have different characteristics in different countries, and external events are only one factor in their varying popularity, he noted.
“Now, the most urgent issue is Covid-19, but it is not clear how the policy will fare after the pandemic,” he said. “But,” he added, “the fear of the worst helps to avoid the worst.”
The “incredible polarization of society” and the violence in Washington “create a lot of deterrence in other societies,” said Emmanouilidis. “We see where it leads, we want to avoid it, but we are aware that we can also reach that point, that things can get worse.”
If economies go down and populists gain power in France or Italy, he said, “God forbid when Europe faces the next crisis.” This concern – with an eye on the 2022 elections – seems to have been partly the reason why Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was so solicitous with France and with Macron’s demands.
In Poland, the government has been very pro-Trump and public television has not acknowledged its electoral defeat until Trump did so, said Radoslaw Sikorski, a former foreign and defense minister who is now president of the European Parliament delegation for relations with the United States.
“With Trump’s defeat, there was an audible sound of disappointment from the populist right in Central Europe,” said Sikorski. “For them, the world will be a more lonely place.”
President Andrzej Duda of Poland, who met Trump in Washington in June, simply called the Capitol revolt an internal affair. “Poland believes in the power of American democracy,” he added.
Similarly, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban, a staunch supporter of Trump, declined to comment on the riot. “We must not interfere with what is happening in America, this is a matter for America, we are rooting for them and we trust that they will be able to solve their own problems,” he told state radio.
Mr. Sikorski, the former Polish minister, is a political opponent of the current government in his country. Europe, he said, needed to “wake up to the dangers of extreme right-wing violence” and conspiracy theories. “There is far more extreme right-wing violence than jihadist violence,” he said. “We cannot assume that this kind of madness will go away, because they have their own facts. We need to take off the gloves – liberal democracy must defend itself ”.
Enrico Letta, a former prime minister of Italy who is now dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, said that Trump “has given credibility to the disruptive attitudes and approaches of populist leaders in Europe, so having him out is a big problem for them. ”Then came the riot, he said,” which I think has completely changed the map. “
Now, like Le Pen, Italian populist leaders felt “forced to sever their ties with some forms of extremism,” said Letta. “They have lost the ability to preserve that ambiguity about their ties to extremists on the margins,” he added.
He said Trump’s defeat and the violent responses to it were considerable blows to European populism. The coronavirus disaster alone, he added, represented “the revenge of competence and the scientific method” against the obscurantism and anti-elitism of populism, noting that the problems surrounding Brexit were also a blow.
“We even started to think that Brexit was positive for the rest of Europe, allowing for a relaunch,” said Letta. “Nobody followed Britain, and now there is the collapse of Trump.”
But Moïsi, the analyst at Institut Montaigne, hit a darker note. Having written about the emotions of geopolitics, he sees a dangerous analogy in what happened at the Capitol, noting that this could be considered a heroic event among many of Trump’s supporters.
The riots reminded him, he said, of the failure at Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and the start of the Nazi Party in Munich in 1923.
This effort to overthrow the Bavarian government also had elements of farce and was widely ridiculed, but it has become “the fundamental myth of the Nazi regime,” said Moïsi. Hitler passed the sentence he received after the violence by writing “Mein Kampf”.
Mr. Moïsi cited the death of Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran shot by a Capitol police officer. “If things go wrong in America,” he said, “this woman could be the first martyr.”