Populist-right in Europe needs its own Project 2025

Every four years, European media reports breathlessly on the latest happenings in America’s presidential elections. This is fairly reasonable, particularly this year. After all, Donald Trump could become the first president in nearly 140 years to return to the White House for a non-consecutive second term. And he could bring with him a complete rethink of American foreign policy.

One topic in particular has received a surprising amount of attention: Project 2025. The programme, a product of the Heritage Foundation, America’s premier conservative think-tank, has been mentioned in headlines across Europe and the world. It is rare for detailed American policy proposals to get attention in the United States, much less in other countries. But this one is supposedly different. It has been derided as authoritarian, Christian nationalist, or fascist (that ever-present and almost always wrongly-applied word), among other things. 

Of course, it is none of those. Not only is it an eminently reasonable idea, it is one that European conservatives should consider copying.

Let us start with what Project 2025 is actually all about. It was inspired by experiences during Trump’s first presidential term when, early on, two issues became quickly apparent. Firstly, the conservative movement had not prepared for a Trump victory. They did not see it coming and did not have serious policy proposals ready to go. As a result, things were sort of scattershot. Trump could provide leadership, but the president can only do so much when there is absolutely no preparation at levels below him.

Project 2025 seeks to get past this problem with a series of policy proposals from serious thinkers. This Policy Agenda is a series of ideas, a menu from which President Trump could pick if he so chooses. Not all will be picked. In fact, most may be ignored. Trump has his own set of policy plans he calls Agenda 47, and what Trump wants will rightfully take precedence. But the ideas in Project 2025 could still act as starting points and ensure that Trump hits the ground running.

The second issue was the civil service. In the United States, as in European countries, the civil service is formally non-political, serving from administration to administration. But the problem is that most members of the civil service in the United States are overwhelmingly Democrats. One study found that in 2020, federal employees gave far more money to Democrats than to Republicans; in some federal agencies, over 90 per cent of donations went to Democrats.

This is not to imply that these employees do not do good work. But it is to point out they are human. They are simply not going to work as hard for a president they disagree with than they would for a president they do not agree with. Think about any job you have ever had. When you cared about the goal of the company, you worked harder. It is the same here. If a newly-inaugurated President Trump signs an order banning foreign aid from going to groups which perform abortions, does anyone think that a pro-choice employee will rush to put that order into motion? Of course not.

Project 2025 has a solution for this problem: a personnel database, full of vetted conservatives who are ready to work. This could work in tandem with Schedule F, an executive order which could list civil service positions as political positions – meaning that those individuals could be fired at will by a president who finds that they are trying to slow his agenda, and replaced with someone who will get the job done.

So in short, Project 2025 is a framework for how a conservative administration could operate with maximum success and minimum internal resistance.

Now what does this have to do with Europe? Well, many in the populist-right have never governed their countries before. Their parties are either new, or they have been in the opposition. They may have been extremely effective in that opposition, but that is a far cry from leading.

In Brussels, they have simply never governed at all. Only in this year’s past elections did the populist-right gain a truly significant foothold in the European Parliament, and even then, governing is still out of reach. One reason is that the European People’s Party, an ostensibly conservative party, is wary of allying with the populist-right. But that is partially because they are uncertain as to what the populist-right actually wants to do. Yes, each parliamentary grouping has some sort of platform on which they run, but platforms are often thin gruel, and are a far cry from serious policy proposals. By having a series of real, deep, and detailed policy proposals, the populist-right parties and groupings will come across more serious to their potential allies (and, as an aside, to voters).

But even if they were to obtain power (in their own capitals or in Brussels), they would still face a Brussels bureaucracy which is absolutely full of people who are fundamentally opposed to the populist-right. Here, a personnel database could come in handy. Each wasted political appointment is a disaster; by having reams of names, populist-right parties could guarantee each appointment is a home run. But it could also help to avoid calamitous PR disasters. It is no secret that populist-right parties sometimes have issues with party members saying or doing things which cost votes. If they get into power and immediately fill positions with people who have irresponsible tongues, they may not get a second shot at governing. 

There is one final benefit which has not yet been discussed: money. Currently, there is no real think-tank structure in the European Right. It simply does not exist. There are some, and certain cities – notably Budapest – play host to a lot of people working very hard to make a populist-right Europe a reality. But one city does not a movement make. The populist-right needs organizations in Brussels, Rome, Paris, Warsaw, and Vienna, among others.

They can get that with policy ideas. While this may be a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem, by creating serious policy proposals and a network of serious personnel, the populist-right parties could gain donor interest. Those donors would then be open to building networks and volunteering their time and money to putting together think-tanks, which could then build up even more policy proposals and train recruits who could go on to staff populist-right governments.

This would all take self-control, effort, money, and patience. But if it paid off, a European Project 2025 could, in the end, help the populist-right win power in places it never has before – including in Brussels.