The European Nationalist International and their Trumpista American friends

Far-right parties like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), and France’s National Rally (RN) are a significant party of European politics. There are two groups of rightwing political parties in the European Parliament, the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) group and the Patriots for Europe group, which includes Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz group in Hungary. European parliaments typically use a seating arrangement which groups the parties from left to right. By their seating arrangements, ESN is to the right of the Patriots group.

International cooperation among parties is nothing new. And of course there are laws regulating what the various parties can and cannot do in terms of their relationships.

The idea of cross-border cooperation between hardline rightwing nationalist parties seems like a contraction in terms. And it obviously has its limits. But the idea of a “nationalist international” is inherently self-contradictory at a conceptual level. But cooperation across borders between even hardline nationalist groups is also nothing new. Marin Kristoffer Hamre looks at the 1930s version of this phenomenon in his 2025 book, Fascists of the World, Unite?

Hamre relates how the Italian and German fascist governments both set up groups to promote organizations in other countries that followed their respective political models. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry even set up a group under a German Nazi supporter, Hans Keller, “the International Action of Nationalists (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten, IAdN) in the spring of 1934. In English, the organization was mainly referred to as the Nationalist International.”

Hamre writes:

The analytical concept of Nazi internationalism is rarely used by historians because of the ultranationalist, völkisch, racist, expansionist, destructive, and ultimately anti-internationalist character of Nazi Germany, which largely denied any 'universal' implications of its Germanic-Nordic-Aryan ideology. Nevertheless, ... several agencies from Nazi Germany became involved in fascist internationalism, though with different visions and objectives. These included the organization World-Service (Welt-Dienst, WD), which attempted to influence and unite various fascist movements based on antisemitism …. Another example is the so-called Anti-Komintern (Antikomintern) led by Eberhard Taubert, which Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry orchestrated to spread anticommunist propaganda internationally and to unite people, movements, and regimes against so-called Judeo-Bolshevism. (pp. 104-105) [my emphasis in bold]

I recently posted about how various far-right parties in the EU are endorsing Orbán’s Fidesz party April 12 elections in Hungary. Two Politico columnists recently referred to that event as “this year’s most consequential election in the EU.” (1) Orbán brand of authoritarianism is seen as a model by American Trumpistas, in which oligarchs can heavily influence the results of elections in such a way that actual competitive elections take place but the opposition is at a serious structural disadvantage. Politico describes it:

Challengers to the ruling party face a system designed to favor Fidesz. In 2011 Orbán’s government redrew electoral districts and overhauled the voting system to maximize its chances of winning seats.

“There is no direct interference with the act of voting itself, yet the broader competitive environment — both in terms of institutional rules and access to resources — tilts heavily in favor of the governing parties,” said political analyst Márton Bene at the TK Institute of Political Science in Budapest.

In addition to controlling roughly 80 percent of the media market, the government allows ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries (who tend to favor Fidesz) to vote by mail, whereas those living abroad who have kept their Hungarian addresses must travel to embassies to cast their ballots. [my emphasis]

Many of those ethnic Hungarians voting in neighboring countries are in Romania, which includes 1 million ethnic Hungarians, mostly in the Romanian region of Transylvania. One aspect of Orbán’s nationalism is that he rejects the validity of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which established the current international borders between Hungary and Romania after the First World War. In other words, Orbán has ambitions to take part of the legal territory of Romania. So this unusual arrangement of letting ethnic-Hungarian vote in Hungarian elections is not only manipulation of elections. It can lead to actual border conflict at some point between the two countries.

But there are some signs at the moment that some of the far-right European admiration for Trump is bumping against the limits of the nationalist ideologies. After all, Trump is positioning himself as hostile to Europe and the EU and is currently threatening military action against Denmark. It’s a challenge for rightwing parties to pose as superpatriots for their own countries or “patriots for Europe” if they are backing a country positioning itself as hostile and even threatening an old-fashioned imperialist annexation of part of Denmark.

James Angelos reports on recent noises the German AfD has been making, even though Trump and JD Vance have been verbally supporting them:

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has long sought close ties to the Trump administration in its quest for powerful international allies and an end to its political isolation at home.

But as public sentiment in Germany increasingly turns against U.S. President Donald Trump and his foreign interventionism - in particular his talk of taking control of Greenland and his seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro - AfD leaders are recalibrating, putting distance between their party and a U.S. president they previously embraced.

“He has violated a fundamental election promise, namely not to interfere in other countries, and he has to explain that to his own voters,” Alice Weidel, one of the AfD’s national leaders, said earlier this week. …

By distancing themselves from Trump, the AfD leaders are following the path of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in France, whose leaders, due to the American president’s deep unpopularity there, have been far more critical of Trump and view his administration’s overtures to European nationalists as a liability. In response to Trump’s stances on Greenland and Venezuela, for instance, National Rally President Jordan Bardella recently accused the American leader of harboring “imperial ambitions.”

The AfD’s criticism this week, by contrast, was tepid; but even mild disapproval has been rare from the party’s leaders. From the moment Trump began his second term, the German far right has seen American ideological backing — including from billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk and U.S. Vice President JD Vance — as key to boosting the party’s domestic legitimacy< and breaking the “firewall” that mainstream parties have historically imposed to keep the AfD from power. [my emphasis in bold] (2) /blockquote>
The AfD leaders have generally taken a Putin-friendly approach in foreign affairs, as has the French National Rally group. Their positions can’t be taken as some kind of indication of current Russian foreign policy positions. But it’s also worth remembering that the US annexing Greenland as a colony (or whatever it is that the Trumpistas have in mind would mean a new US possession very close to Russia.

Carl Schmitt never goes away

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a German political theorist known especially for his theories on the “state of emergency” as the most important element of political sovereignty. Lars Vinx writes:

Though Schmitt had not been a supporter of National Socialism before Hitler came to power, he sided with the Nazis after 1933. Schmitt quickly obtained an influential position in the legal profession and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism ... He devoted himself, with undue enthusiasm, to such tasks as the defence of Hitler’s extra-judicial killings of political opponents and the purging of German jurisprudence of Jewish influence. (3)

He was a bad guy, in other words. But he “remained an important figure in West Germany’s conservative intellectual scene to his death in 1985.” His theories are still taken seriously, even by people who find him and his general ideology despicable. His focus on the importance to authoritarian politics of the authoritarians’ strong emphasis on defining their opponents as enemies, not just as opponents. He also focused heavily on justifications for international aggression by Nazi Germany against other countries.

Schmitt’s theories on international relations bear some at least vague resemblance to the “realist” school of international relations. Which means thinkers on the center and left can at least find elements in Schmitt’s views that have some explanatory power of international behavior that may be underplayed in more Wilsonian liberal-internationalist views.

Ian Klinke observes:

Political scientist Herfried Münkler [a respectable and relatively well-known German historian], whose books have found themselves on Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen’s laps, was among the first to point to Schmitt’s geopolitical writings as a key to unlock the present moment. Like others, he sees in a world of regional blocs organized around spheres of influence the realization of Schmitt’s schema.

Centrists like Münkler are not alone. After Nicolás Maduro’s abduction, the German-speaking far right too has flocked to a 1939 pamphlet in which Schmitt proposed an order modeled on America’s Monroe Doctrine. Not just Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s hard-liner Maximilian “Mad Max” Krah welcomed a new Schmittian Großraumordnung (an order of great spaces) on X. The Austrian activist Martin Sellner, aka “Mr Remigration,” called for a European Monroe doctrine also … [my emphasis] (4)

The inconsistency of the notion of nationalist internationalism is obvious in the relationship of the Trump Administration and the European far right. While they share a hostility to democracy and the rule of law. They believe in their own version of a “Hobbesian” world in which The Nation is the only political value that really matters.

But Klinke also notes that Schmitt admired the US Monroe Doctrine as a model for regional powers dividing the world into spheres of influence. And that notion is ultimately inconsistent with a system of international law. But any new version of German expansionism of the kind that presumably warms the cold hears of German AfDers would very quickly run into some practical obstacles:

But the new right too is interested in Germany’s “lost territories,” in German minorities in Poland, and in upholding the memory of the German “victims” of the post-1945 European territorial order. Nineteen forty-five was a German “defeat,” Alice Weidel has said, rejecting the dominant postwar narrative that frames the country’s reckoning primarily in terms of German guilt.

Any territorially revisionist agenda will run up against an obvious problem: Poland. German right-wing circles may have many disagreements with their Polish counterparts that could spark conflict between an AfD-led Germany and its eastern neighbor. But the German minority in Poland is small, and it is virtually nonexistent in the other “lost territories,” such as Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, Lithuania’s Klaipėda region, and the Czech Republic’s Sudetenland. Germany’s post-Potsdam refugee population is very elderly and rapidly dwindling. What is more, Warsaw is now Europe’s largest defense spender as a percentage of GDP. It is a peer for the Bundeswehr, not a state to be pushed around or carved up. [my emphasis]

Angelos gives an example of how the AfD can rhetorically use Trump’s foreign policy as a model for Germany:

Germany’s government, Weidel suggested, could learn a lesson about how to put national self interest above other considerations.

Trump’s recent actions were based on “geostrategic reasons,” Weidel declared. “I would like to see the German federal government finally making policies for the German people, in the interest of Germany.”

Notes:

(1) Jochecová, Ketrin & Griera, Max (2026): Hungary: 5 key questions about the EU’s most important election of 2026. Politico EU 01/15/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-viktor-orban-fidesz-peter-magyar-tisza-5-key-questions-election-2026/> (Accessed: 2026-15-01).

(2) Angelos, James (2026): Germany’s far right loosens its embrace of Trump. Politico EU 01/16/2026. https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-donald-trump-afd-greenland-nicolas-maduro-national-rally/ (Accessed: 2026-18-01).

(3) Vinx, Lars, "Carl Schmitt", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2025 Edition). Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2025/entries/schmitt/>. (Accessed: 2026-18-01).

(4) Klinke, Ian (2026): Germans Are Reading Carl Schmitt in the Ruins of Atlanticism. Jacobin 01/17/2026. <https://jacobin.com/2026/01/germany-schmitt-afd-monroe-doctrine> (Accessed: 2026-18-01).