Europe’s far-right leaders applaud Trump and downplay threat of possible US tariffs

MADRID (AP) — Europe’s far-right leaders applauded U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda and spoke of the turning point it presented Europe at an event Saturday organized by Spain’s Vox party in Madrid under the banner “Make Europe Great Again.”

Those gathered included Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Italy’s Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, French National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen and others.

Salvini and Vox president Santiago Abascal downplayed Trump’s threat to hike tariffs on European imports, saying that the European Union’s taxes and regulations are a bigger danger to Europe’s prosperity.

“The great tariff is the Green Deal and the confiscatory taxes of Brussels and socialist governments across Europe,” said Abascal.

Salvini referenced the “historic opportunity” ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election, in which the far-right Alternative for Germany party is polling in second place, behind center-right opposition leader Friedrich Merz’s Union bloc.

“The engine of Europe has come to a halt in the face of the most disastrous government of the post-war period,” Salvini said of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

The defense of Europe’s borders against illegal immigration was another topic touched on by every speaker at the two-day event, even though irregular border crossings into the European Union fell sharply in 2024, according to data collected by the bloc’s border control agency Frontex.

Le Pen said that Trump’s election triumph put Europe before a “real change,” and said that the EU had left the continent at the margins of ongoing technological revolutions in artificial intelligence and other realms.

She also said that it was the European leaders present at the gathering, whose Patriots for Europe group has 84 seats in the European Parliament, who had the best chance of communicating and working with Trump.

“We are the only ones that can talk with the new Trump administration,” Le Pen said.