All European leaders have had to adjust their ways of thinking and governing to address American President Donald Trump’s dramatic changes in US policy and its attitude toward its European allies. Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s approach is precisely what one should not do if one wants to avoid a trade war and an American retreat from NATO.
Sanchez’s acts are moreover a rational response to political pressures that he faces from his country’s Left, which are not materially different from those arising across the global Left. This indicates that it will increasingly be harder for the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) to continue their historic alliance in the European Union.
Most European leaders are trying to accommodate Trump’s whims and preferences without being either obsequious or insulting to him. At one pole of this spectrum, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz talks a tough game at home, telling Germans that they need to take on more responsibility for their defence because America is no longer reliable, while also reassuring Trump in person that he backs the American war versus Iran.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte perhaps sits on the other pole, effusively praising Trump in public and private. He presumably thinks that’s the best way to keep America involved in NATO’s defence even if the fulsome praise rankles European ears.
But he no longer has to face an electorate, so he can afford to get cosy with Trump. Those still involved in electoral politics, like Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron, must balance criticism with praise while also preparing their nations’ militaries and economies for the inevitable rebalancing to come.
All of these leaders, however, come from Europe’s centrist liberal or centre-right Christian Democratic parties. Their main political pressure comes from their Right, the burgeoning populist parties that seek to gain with every new election.
Sunday’s vote in the prosperous German state of Baden-Wurttemberg is just another example of this trend. Merz’s CDU fell just short of the ruling Greens while the populist AfD nearly doubled its vote share. Meanwhile the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) fell out of the Landtag entirely for the first time ever.
That’s disastrous as Baden had long been one of the FDP’s bastions. Coming on the heels of last year’s vote, where the FDP fell out of the Bundestag, it’s yet another sign that the longstanding third wheel in classic German politics might be headed for History’s dustbin.
These considerations push the liberals and conservatives to balance support for the European project with nationalistic tones. The far Left, however, is in revolt over the Trumpist revolution and the way it has pushed Europe to the Right. That fact means centre-left leaders have to balance in the other direction, offering more direct criticism and fewer, if any, conciliatory policies toward Trump.
Danish Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has gained support with her angry and defiant rejection of Trump’s oafish efforts to buy – or perhaps seize – Greenland. This allows her to appease the Left and show nationalistic passion, giving her party a good chance at finishing first in this month’s snap election.
Sanchez, however, sits on even more parlous ground. Head of a minority government, he depends on multiple far-left and regionalist parties simply to stay in power. Polls show his party would easily lost to a centre-right and populist coalition, taking the prospect of a snap election after a manufactured crisis off the table.
It’s thus not surprising that he is running headlong to the Left by decrying the American attack as illegal and denying the US the ability to use Spanish bases in the war. This comes on the heels of a recent decree giving more than 500,000 illegals immigrants temporary legal status and last year’s refusal to agree to increase the country’s core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 as all other NATO nations agreed.
Sanchez’s stance makes political sense for a leader of the Left worried about losing voters to even more extreme parties. The trouble is that this calculus makes it very difficult for any centrist or centre-right party to ally with it.
That’s not a problem for Sanchez, as there is no national centrist party that he can look to for support. But that’s not possible in the EU Parliament, nor is it viable in virtually any other European nation.
This divide is already evident in the Parliament with respect to the EU-US trade deal. The EPP and the conservative populist European and Conservative Reformists (ECR) want to move forward with the deal, while the Greens, Socialists, and centrist Renew Europe (RE) do not.
This coming split in the traditional Brussels consensus is unavoidable given the stresses Trump is placing on the world. The fact that support for openly conservative and rightist populist parties is also growing means the old regime is living on borrowed time.
No one can know when time will finally toll for the old order. That time, however, is coming, and when it does it will be leaders like Sanchez whose unwillingness to bend will cause the consensus to break.
Polite as it was, ‘Shape up or we’ll ship out’ was Rubio’s message to Europe