The nationalists' impossible position
Europe's nationalist parties are distancing themselves from Trump. What they cannot do is distance themselves from America.
Marine Le Pen told her lawmakers this week to keep their distance from Trump. AfD members called the Trump-Orbán embrace a millstone around the Hungarian leader’s neck. Even Meloni sided with the Pope over the American president on the Iran war. Europe’s nationalist right is distancing itself, and the financial press is calling it a strategic pivot.
It isn’t. It is the same mechanism it has always been.
Europe’s nationalists are not capable of a genuine break with Washington. Their voters want independence from Brussels, but their countries remain embedded in a security architecture underwritten by the United States and a trade structure that still depends on American consent. Distancing from Trump is politically cheap. Restructuring those dependencies is politically lethal because it means higher defense spending, inferior near-term capabilities, and a security gap that becomes apparent before the election that follows.
What appears to be fragmentation is actually the equilibrium state: align when useful, distance when toxic, never pay the price of actual independence. Orbán lost in Hungary for reasons that go beyond his proximity to Trump: corruption, cost of living, a credible opposition candidate. But embracing Trump did not help, and European nationalists have noticed, and the lesson they have drawn is not to change their politics. It is to manage the optics better.
Le Pen’s ally was unusually precise about it: “We like our friends in Washington, but we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”
That is not nationalism. That is brand management.