Europe’s rightwing populist parties are split over how far to distance themselves from Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, with some fearing unflinching solidarity with the US president’s brand of nationalism will damage their efforts to widen their domestic support.
Broadly, unease over Trump’s treatment of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the ominous encroach of authoritarianism by the new US administration, is strongest among the populist parties in western Europe and some Nordic countries.
By contrast in eastern Europe, where parts of the electorate view Russia sympathetically, support for Trump remains undimmed.
The populists may be right to be cautious about Trump. There are already tentative signs that governments in countries where leaders have taken a pro-Ukrainian line are enjoying a modest boost in support.
For instance, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Social Democrat prime minister, who has clashed with Trump by defending Greenland’s sovereignty and backing arms for Ukraine, is enjoying her highest poll rating in a year. In the UK, Keir Starmer has enjoyed a mini revival, while a YouGov poll shows over half of Reform party voters (53%) view Trump unfavourably, an increase of 25 points.
Prof William Hurst, a co-director at the Centre for Geopolitics, said: “Some of the populists’ disorientation is that their focus is on domestic issues to leverage novel coalitions. What that means for foreign policy is that it leaves a giant question mark. There is no clear roadmap, except they are self-consciously transactional or unconventional. All politics is about domestic politics, but for populists that is doubly so because they are so intent on building these new domestic coalitions.”
Trump’s natural bedfellows are finding this difficult, Hurst says.
For instance, Inger Støjberg, the leader of the rightwing Denmark Democrats, criticised Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy a week ago in the Oval Office, writing: “Shocking and grotesque scenes from the White House in the USA. This is not the USA I know and love! Now we must support and back Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”
The Sweden Democrats leader, Jimmie Åkesson, said Trump’s failure to show “clear support for Ukraine fighting a defensive war for its nation’s existence is very serious. Support for Ukraine needs to be clear and there must be no doubt that Russia has attacked Ukraine and that the country is courageously fighting a defensive war against unprovoked aggression.”
In France, Marine Le Pen, the president of the far-right National Rally (RN), criticised Trump’s withdrawal of military aid as “reprehensible and cruel”. But she also attacked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, saying she would “never support an unrealistic European defence” nor “the dispatch of French combat troops on Ukrainian soil”.
Nevertheless senior RN figures, such as the MEP Thierry Mariani, have questioned whether France faces a Russian security threat. “Who can seriously believe that Russian tanks will arrive tomorrow in Berlin or Paris when they are not even able to take Kramatorsk or Sloviansk?” he asked.
Macron, sensing the right’s vulnerability, used his television address to the nation this week to pitch his support for Ukraine in largely patriotic terms, speaking of defending the homeland, rather than as an expression of European values.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right PVV party in the Netherlands, has also found the issue difficult to navigate. “Fascinating TV but not necessarily the best way to end the war, gentlemen,” he said of Trump and Zelenskyy’s confrontation in the White House.
However, a day later, he hardened his stance. “Of course, the PVV supports Ukraine and with conviction,” he said. “No one benefits from hysterical anti-Trump sentiment. Without the US, there will be no peace, no citizens.”
In Spain, the far-right Vox party has also vacillated. The party’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has presented himself as the true ally of Ukraine and Zelenskyy. “To Putin, [the former Podemos leader] Pablo Iglesias and the allies of [Pedro] Sánchez, this man is a neo-Nazi,” tweeted Abascal, who has also been called a neo-Nazi. “To the free world, he’s an example, a hero and a patriot.”
Vox’s cofounder, Javier Ortega Smith, said: “If Trump decides to turn his back on a European country like Ukraine and divide its borders and make so-called peace agreements without taking into account [this] aggrieved nation, we cannot agree with Trump.”
He asked his party “not to buy into all of Trump’s policies” if they harmed Ukraine or, in reference to tariffs, Spain’s interests.
But notably, Abascal cited domestic reasons to oppose sending Spanish troops to guarantee a ceasefire. “Spanish troops to be put at the service of those who have brought about the war by condemning us to energy dependence, thereby leaving us at the mercy of Putin? Spanish troops at the service of those who have left Europe defenceless by liquidating its external borders? Spanish troops at the service of those who have left Europeans at the mercy of Islamist attacks? Absolutely NOT.”
Another populist in a quandary is the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, a supporter of Ukraine but the European leader with one of the closest ties to Trump. Her tightrope act is made harder by the presence inside her governing coalition of the leader of the League, the pro-Trump Matteo Salvini, an opponent of the “warmongering EU”.
Meloni currently backs extra European military spending, but opposes the use of the EU’s cohesion funds for that purpose. She also opposes European peacekeeping troops inside Ukraine, but will send Italian military chiefs to a meeting about such a force on Tuesday in Paris.
Further east, populist ambivalence towards Trump is less visible. In Poland, Sławomir Mentzen of the far-right Confederation – now second in some polls for May’s presidential elections – has run a virulently anti-Ukrainian campaign, demanding Poles stop letting Kyiv treat them as “suckers” instead of partners.
The poll last week putting Mentzen in second place, with 18.9% support, is likely to push Karol Nawrocki, the candidate endorsed to run as an independent by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, further toward an anti-Ukrainian position.
But the current president, Andrzej Duda, an ally and former member of PiS, is discovering the behaviour of Trump, a close ally, may hurt Polish nationalists. Duda was denounced as a Trump lackey when he was ambivalent in how he would respond if Washington threatened to make US military support for Poland contingent on Warsaw handing over its copper supplies.
In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is certain his close relations with Moscow have been vindicated and is supported by his base. After holding out at this week’s EU meeting over Ukraine, he plans to dwell on the issue by conducting a poll of Hungarians, deemed bogus by his opponents, to test support for Kyiv’s EU accession.
In Romania, where cancelled presidential elections are due to be rerun in May after suspicions of Russian electoral intervention, the far-right candidate Călin Georgescu proudly describes Ukraine as an invented state. He welcomes Washington’s effusive support. Without endorsing Georgescu, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, described Romania as an example of how European allies are “undermining democracy” and “not listening to the voice of the people”.
But even in Bucharest, it is dawning on some pro-European Romanians that servility to Trump may not benefit them electorally, and the populist right may now be exposed to the whims of a US leader who will jettison their interests with no compunction if it suits him.
