Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard write:

When U.S. President Donald Trump was elected for a second term, he launched a political revolution that is fundamentally transforming the political identity of entire countries.

In just six months, the U.S. shifted from championing liberal democracy and free trade to promoting illiberalism and protectionism. Now, that revolution has arrived in Europe, and it’s forcing the bloc to alter its view of the world — along with its place in it.

After talking to 16,000 individuals in 12 European countries, our organization, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), found that Trump’s victory has changed the nature of Europe’s domestic politics as well as its geopolitical standing.

Almost overnight, the bloc’s far right has gone from passionate defenders of national sovereignty against the threat of a federalist EU to the vanguard of a transnational movement that advocates a sort of civilizational nationalism. Conversely, many mainstream parties — or, rather, the ex-globalists — have recast themselves as the new sovereigntists, defending national dignity against what they perceive to be ideological interference from Washington.

Supporters of Europe’s populist parties are no longer protest voters either. According to our data, a majority of those supporting every one of the 10 far-right parties we polled on, think Trump’s reelection will be good for the U.S., and view his actions with sympathy and excitement. Much like the bloc’s far-right leaders, who are copying his policies on everything from immigration to blowing up national bureaucracies.

The result of all this seems to be the emergence of an ideological transatlantic relationship, no longer dividing the continent into pro- and anti-U.S. countries but rather pro- and anti-Trump political parties. Unlike the split triggered by the war in Iraq in 2003, for instance, Eastern Europe isn’t more U.S. friendly than Western Europe because of a strong pro-American societal consensus but because its far-right parties are stronger.

However, it remains unclear whether Europe’s far right will be the major beneficiary or the victim of Trump’s revolution.

On the one hand — as was the case with Brexit — his reelection shows it’s still possible for them to come to power. But if people turn against Trump and his politics, these parties will be the biggest losers. Their support depends on the U.S. leader in the same way support for Western European Communist parties depended on how people viewed the Soviet Union and its policies during the Cold War.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’re now seeing several of Europe’s most traditionally Atlanticist parties, such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, reinventing themselves as defenders of national sovereignty against Trump’s America. It’s a shift that aligns with our polling, which clearly shows the countries that appear to be most skeptical of America today seem to be the ones that were the most Atlanticist yesterday, like the U.K., Germany and Denmark. [Continue reading…]