Europe's political centre frays as Trump prepares to back far-right challengers

Sixteen months ago Ursula von der Leyen stood before cameras in Brussels and declared that the European centre was holding. The 2024 European Parliament elections had delivered a majority for pro-EU forces, and the Commission president called it 'crucial for stability'. That assessment now looks premature. Across the continent's three largest economies, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, far-right parties are leading national polls, mainstream leaders are haemorrhaging public support, and an incoming American administration has formally adopted a strategy to accelerate the disruption.

Britain's coastal laboratory

The transformation is most visible in Jaywick Sands, a stretch of pebbledashed bungalows on the Essex coast that the Office for National Statistics ranks as England's most deprived neighbourhood. In the Never Say Die pub, 82-year-old Dave Laurence nurses a lager and explains why he broke a lifetime habit of not voting to back Nigel Farage. 'I quite like him. He's doing the best he can,' Laurence says. He describes himself as 'racist' and says he would never vote for a Black candidate such as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. His overriding fear is the small boats crossing the Channel. 'Soon the country will be full of Muslims and they'll fucking rebel against us.'

Jaywick once featured in a 2018 American MAGA advertisement as a warning of what awaited the United States if Trump's opponents prevailed. Today it is the heartland of Reform UK, the party Farage leads from the backbenches of the House of Commons. Polls consistently place Reform ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, making Farage a credible contender for prime minister should an election be called before the scheduled 2029 date. The turnaround is vertiginous: in July 2024 Keir Starmer won a historic Labour landslide, and his aides travelled to Washington to advise Democrats. Now Starmer's approval rating sits at 21%, he is mocked as 'First Gear Keir', and rivals are reportedly manoeuvring to replace him.

The small boats issue that animates Laurence has intensified. According to Oxford University's Migration Observatory, 14,800 people crossed the Channel in small boats between January and May 2025, a 42% increase on the same period a year earlier. The numbers have returned immigration to the top of the political agenda, reviving Farage's fortunes after a post-Brexit lull. As Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King's College London, observes, the 2016 referendum map can be read through culinary geography: 'Places that had a Pret voted Remain.' Areas with lower median wages voted Leave. The same economic divide now fuels Reform's rise.

France's hung parliament and the Le Pen succession

Across the Channel, Emmanuel Macron's gamble on a snap legislative election in 2024 produced a hung parliament that has paralysed French governance. Three prime ministers have fallen since summer 2024 over budget disputes, and a proposed pension-age increase has prompted rating agencies to warn of a downgrade. Macron's approval has collapsed to 11%. Alain Minc, a former mentor and adviser, delivers a withering verdict: 'He'll leave a political landscape that is perhaps durably unstable. It's unforgivable.'

The beneficiary is Marine Le Pen's National Rally, now polling at 34% under its youthful party president Jordan Bardella. Unlike her father, Le Pen has spent years 'dediabolising' the party, softening its image while retaining its anti-immigration core. The strategy mirrors a broader European pattern: far-right parties are shedding overt extremism to become the default opposition for voters who feel the centre has failed them. Macron, who once disrupted French politics by founding his own centrist movement, now lacks any party machinery to defend his position.

Germany's fragile coalition and the AfD breakthrough

In Berlin, Friedrich Merz's conservative bloc won February's snap election but governs with the Social Democrats on a majority of just 52% of Bundestag seats, one of the slimmest since 1949. The coalition is ideologically uneasy, vulnerable to minor defections, and struggling to pass ambitious legislation. Merz attempted to undercut the Alternative for Germany (AfD) by shifting right on migration. The tactic backfired: the AfD won 21% in February, its best national result since the war, and now leads the conservatives in several polls.

The development shocks a political culture built on historical immunity. 'For a long time in Germany we thought with our history, and the way we teach in our schools, we would be a bit more immune to that,' a senior German official said. 'It turned out we are not.' The AfD's rise follows a familiar trajectory: the 2015-16 arrival of over a million refugees under Angela Merkel created the political space the party has occupied ever since. Mainstream parties' refusal to engage with voter concerns on immigration, rather than the numbers themselves, created the opening.

The Dutch exception that proves the rule

Even the Netherlands, where centrist Rob Jetten of D66 narrowly defeated Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in October 2024, offers limited comfort. Wilders' party won the same number of seats as D66 and remains a dominant force. The Ipsos survey found the Netherlands and France shared the highest rates of democratic dissatisfaction among the nine countries studied. Wilders, like Trump, could return, a reminder that narrow centrist victories do not reset the underlying dynamics.

Economic stagnation as the structural driver

Beneath the political turbulence lies a economic reality that centrist governments struggle to address. The 2008 financial crisis and the 2020-21 pandemic lockdowns left public finances depleted across the West. Menon calculates that the UK economy was 16% smaller a decade after 2008 than pre-crisis trends would have predicted. 'Crucially, the impact was massively unequal,' he says. 'Prosperous places with high productivity, with well-educated workforces suffered far, far less than poorer parts of the country.'

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, warned the G20 in November of an 'inequality emergency' driven by war, pandemic and trade disruption, cautioning that the crisis risks 'preparing the ground for more authoritarian leaders'. The Ipsos data corroborates the link: 45% of 10,000 voters across nine countries expressed dissatisfaction with how democracy functions, rising to 57% among far-left voters and 54% among far-right voters. Gideon Skinner, Ipsos's head of political research, identifies three primary drivers, cost of living, immigration and crime, and notes that trust in politics fell in the 1990s, took another hit after 2008, and has not recovered. 'There may be specific things that have made it worse over the last couple of years but it's also a long-term condition,' Skinner said. 'It's something we do need to worry about and there is not a silver bullet that can fix it all.'

Washington's new doctrine: explicit intervention

What distinguishes the current moment from previous cycles of populist advance is the overt involvement of the United States. A National Security Strategy document released in December frames Europe as facing 'civilisational erasure' from unrestricted immigration and falling birthrates, language drawn directly from the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory. The document condemns European 'political correctness' as censorship and pledges to use American diplomacy to cultivate 'resistance' on migration and support parties it describes as 'patriotic'.

Trump confirmed the approach in an interview this week. European nations are 'decaying', he said, and their 'weak' leaders can expect challenges from rivals with American backing. 'I'd endorse,' he added. Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s, describes the strategy as 'maximum polarization that hollows out the center'. The old established parties of left and right that dominated the postwar era have weakened, he argues, and the nationalist right's revolt targets them directly.

Brussels confronts the double bind

In Brussels, the combination of Trump's interview and the strategy document has left diplomats 'bruised and alarmed', according to officials who had allowed themselves to hope the transatlantic relationship might stabilise. The European Commission now faces a double bind: von der Leyen's European People's Party group in the European Parliament relies on far-right votes to pass legislation, while the White House prepares to treat the EU's own regulatory framework, on migration, speech, technology, as a target for disruption.