Trump's chaos weakens European far right even as trade wars risk new fuel

The assumption that a second Trump presidency would automatically supercharge Europe's anti-migration populists is collapsing under the weight of contradictory evidence. Across the continent, centrist and pro-European parties are gaining ground. EU approval ratings have hit record highs. In country after country, voters who once flirted with hard-right leaders are returning to moderate governance. The Canadian precedent, where the Liberal Party reversed a polling deficit against the Conservatives after Trump's election alienated Canadian voters, is repeating itself in Europe, but with deeper structural consequences.

The stability premium

Two forces are driving the realignment. The first is geopolitical. Trump's hostility toward NATO allies and his openness to authoritarian leaders have sharpened Europe's sense of vulnerability. Combined with Russia's war in Ukraine, the unpredictability of the US security guarantee has made stability a salient political currency. Populist posturing looks risky when the alliance architecture that underpins European defence is being stressed from within. Voters are not necessarily embracing federalism; they are rejecting chaos.

The second force is economic. Trump's tariffs on EU goods, steel, aluminium, automotive, and a widening list of other sectors, have united business federations and government ministers in a way that years of Commission advocacy could not. The European Commission's trade defence instruments, long criticised as slow or insufficient, are suddenly being treated as essential shields. When the external threat is a 25 per cent tariff on your car exports, the single market stops looking like a bureaucratic constraint and starts looking like a survival mechanism.

Migration slips down the agenda

The immediate political consequence is visible in polling. Across multiple member states, the share of voters naming migration and asylum as a top-tier concern has fallen sharply over the past year. Security, inflation, and the cost of living have displaced it. This is not because the flows have stopped, irregular arrivals via the central Mediterranean and the western Balkans remain substantial, but because the hierarchy of fear has shifted. A voter worried about mortgage rates and energy bills is less receptive to the argument that asylum seekers are the primary driver of their insecurity.

Far-right parties are not disappearing. The Rassemblement National in France, the AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and Brothers of Italy in Rome all retain formidable polling floors. But their momentum has stalled. In Germany, the AfD's surge in 2023 and early 2024 plateaued before the European elections. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' coalition government has struggled to translate electoral success into governing competence. The pattern suggests a ceiling: populist votes are available when the system feels broken, but they evaporate when the alternative looks like genuine instability.

The labour market contradiction

Beneath the polling shifts lies a structural trap that Trump's own policies illuminate. Protectionism aims to reshore industry. Reshoring requires workers. Europe's working-age population is shrinking, Eurostat projects a decline of more than 20 million people aged 20-64 by 2050, and the sectors most targeted for revitalisation (manufacturing, construction, green technology, care) are already reporting acute shortages. The OECD estimates that the EU needs roughly 1.5 million net arrivals per year simply to stabilise the labour force. Anti-migration rhetoric and industrial policy are on a collision course.

The contradiction is already forcing policy reversals. Germany's Skilled Immigration Act, Italy's seasonal worker quotas, France's talent passport expansions, all were enacted or expanded by governments that campaigned on restriction. The Netherlands, under a Wilders-backed coalition, has quietly increased work permits for healthcare and tech. Poland, which once positioned itself as the vanguard of border closure, now issues more first residence permits to non-EU nationals than any other member state. Economic necessity is a stricter disciplinarian than any Commission recommendation.

Trade wars as populist fuel?

There is a counter-scenario. If Trump's tariffs trigger a global recession, and the IMF has already downgraded 2025 growth forecasts for the euro area to 0.8 per cent, the resulting unemployment and fiscal strain could revive the scapegoating that far-right parties specialise in. The 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 migration crisis were distinct events; a trade-war recession would fuse them. A factory worker laid off in Bavaria or Lombardy because US demand collapsed will not be reassured by demographic projections. He will be told, credibly, that the system failed him.

This is the risk that centrist leaders have not yet addressed. They are benefiting from a rejection of Trump-style chaos, not from a positive mandate for managed migration. Their coalitions are fragile. Germany's traffic-light government collapsed in late 2024. France's minority administration survives vote by vote. Italy's Meloni governs with a majority but faces constant pressure from her right flank. A sustained downturn would test all of them.

The centrist opening

The window for a different migration politics is narrow but real. If centrist parties can articulate a narrative that links European security, industrial competitiveness, and demographic reality, we need workers to build the defence industrial base, to install the heat pumps, to staff the hospitals, they could displace the fear-based framing that has dominated for a decade. The European Commission's forthcoming Skills and Talent Mobility package, delayed from 2024, will be a test of whether the institutions can match rhetoric with operational tools: faster recognition of qualifications, portable social security, digital visa processing.

None of this is inevitable. The populist wave has been declared dead before, after Macron's 2017 victory, after the 2019 European elections, after the 2024 European elections, only to resurge when the next crisis hit. Trump's presidency is not the cause of Europe's populist plateau; it is an accelerant for trends already in motion. The war in Ukraine, the energy shock, the inflation crisis, and the demographic cliff were all reshaping the political landscape before he returned to the Oval Office. He has simply made the choice between stability and experimentation starker.

What the numbers conceal

Aggregate EU approval ratings mask wide national variation. In Hungary and Slovakia, the EU remains deeply unpopular. In Poland, approval has surged since the Tusk government replaced Law and Justice, but the underlying electorate remains polarised. In France, EU favourability is rising but the Rassemblement National leads presidential polling for 2027. The headline figure, record highs, is real, but it is a composite of divergent trajectories. Any European-level strategy that assumes a uniform pro-EU mood will misread the politics in at least half the member states.