Europe's nationalist, MAGA-style parties are notching election victories and leading in polls across the continent, but the "recipe for their success" appears to hinge on steering clear of President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

"I can't remember them being mentioned once," said Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Leif-Erik Holm, describing his own campaign. Holm finished first in a regional election in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which took place two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote.

The Post reports that AfD leaders "scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues." In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling ahead of next year's election, has similarly kept Trump and his allies out of her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.

In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is now set to lead a state government with policies that could have come straight from the MAGA playbook. The party campaigned on deporting migrants and cutting funding to museums with "anti-patriotic goals." Yet the Times reports that Trump and the United States were "largely absent during the campaign."

"A lot of people say Trump is arrogant, dangerous, not well-qualified. You see an intensification in his second term of things people didn't like in the first term," said Richard Wike, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center's director of global attitudes research. "That may create incentives for all sorts of political leaders not to embrace him."

The distancing contrasts with official U.S. policy. Backing Europe's antiestablishment right was an official goal of the Trump administration, and the Post reports the State Department even promised grants to organizations promoting what it described as "European sovereignty and other conservative values."

"Late last year, an updated U.S. national-security strategy said the U.S. supported 'patriotic European parties' and would cultivate 'resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations,'" the Post reports.

Trump's popularity, and that of his nation, has fallen into a hole this year. The Post reports that a growing number of countries now view China "more favorably" than the United States and see Xi Jinping "as a more credible leader in managing world affairs," according to a Pew Research Center report. Similar surveys indicate that many right-wing Europeans share unfavorable views of Trump.

The president's war with Iran appears central to the shift, continuing to erode his standing at home and abroad while threatening to destabilize the global and U.S. economies through high energy prices.

"It looks like they launched this campaign without much of a concept. It's a bit of a disaster," said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, speaking of Trump's war on Iran.

Trump's positions on a range of issues, including tariffs, the ownership of Greenland and the war in Ukraine, also keep clashing with European interests — even the nationalist ones, the Times reports. And Trump's close link to Hungary's Viktor Orbán may have helped the Hungarian leader lose his re-election bid, to Trump's ire.

With the AfD preparing to govern in Saxony-Anhalt and Le Pen polling ahead in France, the next rounds of voting will show whether keeping Trump at arm's length remains the recipe for success the Post describes.

Source: Alternet