MGGA – Make Germany Great Again – is hardly a phrase to trip lightly off the tongue. But it is one the US President posted approvingly on Truth Social after the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party won the largest slice of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in September (and is now trying to form a regional government).
It signalled that a courtship of Donald Trump, launched by the AfD when he won his first election in 2016 has started to bear fruit. The President is a fan of success and the party, which Germany’s domestic security service monitors as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation, is now the most popular force nationally at around 27 per cent of the vote.
Familiarity with the Trump world has been hard-won. A huge cache of leaked internal documents shows the AfD agonising from 2016 on how to cosy up to a new and disruptive political force across the Atlantic. Conflicting egos of the party’s leadership scrapped about how to couch their blandishments. In the end a wing of the populist party which did not like bowing and scraping to any US leader was out-argued by those who hankered to get on his radar and beg favours.
Undeniably, as the populist forces of the further right have pummelled the centre parties across Europe, Trumpworld has become more interested in Maga-aligned movements in Germany, France and a ferocious battle ground in the up-coming Spanish snap elections.
One person who will say I told you so – because he very often does – is Steve Bannon, whom I interviewed in 2016 predicting that the Trump doctrine could and should internationalise itself: a franchise on the far right, in the manner of McDonald’s or Starbucks, uniformly available with some local differences.
The leaked files now also show that Alice Weidel, AfD co-leader, was looking for an advisory deal with Bannon. Even if that did not come off, the party appears to have solicited paid advice from a Maga media strategist on how to circumvent critical reporting of its activities by creating its own ecology of friendly streaming services and websites. That has duly happened.
Clashing egos often get in the way of grand schemes and dreams when there is really only one ego that matters in the White House. Bannon was banished to the outer fringes of Maga, yet his legacy is back as the administration has offered more encouragement to today’s European acolytes.
This week, Trump made sympathetic noises to Marine Le Pen, saying she was a true conservative who had been “badly treated” in a conviction for embezzlement. Weidel, the most polished media performer of the AfD top brass – and a former financial analyst who has experience of US corporate culture from her time at Goldman Sachs – has emerged as the main connector for the party to the White House, meeting JD Vance in 2025. That pairing is not accidental.
Trump, however gut-driven his politics and conduct, is wily enough to farm out alliances with fraternal European parties to his deputy. It signals interest in their progress – without tying him to them or to any future embarrassments or entirely disrupting his relations with Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron. In the UK setting, there seems to be less frequent and jovial thumbs-upping with Reform’s Nigel Farage, as Trump focusses on dealings with big players like China and Russia and the Iran war.
Some parallels are however becoming stronger: the more the US has sought to blame Ukraine rather than Russia for the war, the closer it has become to the AfD’s pro-Russia posture.
One major wrinkle in populist alignments is nonetheless inherent in their world view – a scepticism of alliances and fundamentally, insistence that national borders should set boundaries for co-operation and parochial definition of self-interest. Shared causes may range from anti “woke” crusades, a triumph over the march of trans and gender-based arguments, dismissal of climate change as a meaningful threat and the like.
But all of this is driven by the egos of individuals and their whims and preferences. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party struggles to define itself after losing power to a centre-right party. Strains over backing Nato to protect Europe against Russia or trying to assuage the Kremlin are baked deep in populist parties – with the two camps fiercely competing for precedence.
Isolationists can club together in principle, but it is the opposite of their instinct, which is to go it alone. Co-operation and trade-offs jar with their appeal to the politics of place and country over external ties. The AfD’s founders were not only anti-EU but strongly opposed American influence over Europe in the post-war era. Even today, that paradox emerges at rallies where some speakers praise Trump as inspiration while other bemoan the “subordination” and “Americanisation” of Germany.
In many ways, populist movements have risen precisely because people dislike the consequences of US dominance of the global system – even as their leaders seek access to the White House and Mar-a Lago.
These contradictions should give some small comfort to opponents of the march of the the far right across the continent, not because it cannot happen – it already is and the centre ground has often been too smug and self-absorbed to respond with agility to genuine voter discontent. A European Trump movement is, however, still a shaky prospectus. The man himself is happy enough to send coy messages of approval – as long as he does not have to do too much about it. When one ego powers a movement forward everything else is really a tribute band. He’s the one who calls the tune – and the chorus is America First and everyone else behind.