Does Trump have support in Europe? He does, and it’s a sign of the divisions within Europe that the support is potentially quite substantial. Some of that is accidental. When, in February, Trump tweeted that Sweden was the victim of a terror attack, fruit (in his view) of its over-enthusiastic acceptance of tens of thousands of migrants, he was widely derided because there had been no such attack. But shortly after, there was. Swedes, including recent immigrants, began to speak out about running battles between young migrants and the police; Prime Minister Stefan Löfven admitted that “we have challenges, no doubt about that.”
The events have buoyed the far-right Swedish Democrats, who have now overtaken the center-right Moderate Party as the country’s second-largest political group and convinced its leaders that they should consider some cooperation with the anti-immigration Democrats.
Support for Trump is possible elsewhere, too. Italy, the one major country in the EU where the general economic upturn hasn’t happened, is also seeing a spike in the popularity of the far right as record numbers of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa come ashore on Italian beaches.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member