A poll published last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that much of the world is relishing the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Eighty-four per cent of Indians think Trump will be good for their country as do 61 per cent of Saudis. In Russia, South Africa, China and Brazil, more citizens have faith in The Donald than don’t.
It is in Europe where pessimism reigns. Only 15 per cent of Britons believe Trump will benefit them, a figure that rises to 22 per cent in the EU. This is the same sorry percentage of Europeans who regard Trump’s America as an ally ‘that shares our interests and values’
Analysing the survey in the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash of the ECFR wrote that the results would have readers ‘spluttering into your coffee’. How could anyone think positively of Trump!
Condescension has long characterised how the Old Continent regards Uncle Sam. Europeans dress like Americans, eat like Americans, watch American films and listen to American music but they retain an air of ineffable superiority.
This sentiment has strengthened this century with the election of George W. Bush and then Trump.
In August 2001, a month before 9/11, the Pew Research Center published a report into how Bush was viewed in Europe. Not well. In France, Britain, Germany and Italy, the Republican president got an overwhelming thumbs down. Just 20 per cent of French respondents expressed confidence in Bush’s handling of world affairs, while it was 30 per cent for Brits and 33 per cent for Italians.
Three years later Bush was re-elected to office and the response in Europe was one of overwhelming dismay. ‘How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?’ was the headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror.
‘Oh God’, groaned the Guardian, declaring that Bush’s defeat of John Kerry had ‘catapulted liberal Britain into collective depression’.
Not just Britain. Across Europe, people – particularly the elite – held their heads in despair. ‘Oops — they did it again,’ was the headline in Germany’s left-leaning Tageszeitungnewspaper.
The French weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, attributed Bush’s win to the ‘manipulation of emotion, patriotism, feelings and even irrationality’.
A month later a survey confirmed the unpopularity of Bush across Europe. ‘The predominant feelings about Bush’s re-election in the European countries are disappointment and surprise more than anger,’ said a pollster for AP-Ipsos.
It’s taken until now, and the social media offensive of Elon Musk, for Americans to ask the same question of Europeans: how could you be so dumb as to be continually manipulated by your elites?
In the 20 years since that Mirror headline, the EU, with the connivance of various governments, have ignored referendum results in France, Holland and Ireland. In the case of the latter the electorate were ordered back to the voting booths to return a result in favour of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.
In Britain, there was a sustained campaign in Westminster and Brussels to overturn the Leave vote, and in the last 18 months in Holland, France, Spain and Romania, the winners of national elections have been thwarted from taking power.
The most serious example of election irregularities took place in Romania last month when the result of the first round of the presidential election was annulled for spurious reasons after the victory of the Eurosceptic Calin Georgescu.
Thierry Breton, France’s former European Commissioner and an advocate of tighter social media controls, boasted to French TV recently: ‘We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.’
Did what? He denies the EU was involved in the Romanian constitutional court’s decision to cancel the election but that’s not how others see it. Hungarian MEP András László, a member of the Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, tweeted: ‘The EU mainstream refuses to respect democratic norms and the will of the majority. Extremely appalling!’
To which Breton’s nemesis, Elon Musk, replied ‘Exactly’.
Would the EU dare intervene in the event that the Musk-endorsed AfD win next month’s German parliamentary election? Watch this space.
Europe’s progressive elite would be better served asking why the AfD is surging in the polls. It’s the same reason why Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is the biggest single party in France and why Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister of Italy in 2022.
Europe’s economy has tanked in the last 20 years. The future is across the Atlantic and European manufacturers are investing in American industry more than their own: $61 billion in the USA last year (up from $30 billion in 2022) compared to $37 billion in Europe. No wonder Mario Draghi admits he has ‘nightmares’ about the slow death of European industry.
In 2008 the Eurozone and the US had comparable gross domestic products (GDP) of $14.2 trillion and $14.8 trillion in today’s prices. In 2023 the eurozone’s GDP had edged up to just over $15 trillion, while America’s stood at $26.9 trillion.
When the Fortune Global 500 list was published for the year 2023, it underlined the strength of American and Chinese companies and the decline of their European counterparts. Only Germany was keeping its head above water but in the two years since it has plunged into recession and is experiencing what one economist described recently as ‘its greatest crisis in post-war history,’
Germans are now enduring the same drop in living standards as other European nations. Throw in mass immigration, rising crime and crises in health, housing and education and one understands why one Berlin newspaper recently posed the question: ‘Is Germany becoming a Developing Nation?’
The French call this process ‘La Tiers-mondialisation’ (The Third-Worldisation) and have been talking about it since 2009. The phrase was coined by the economist Bernard Conte, who said Europe was transitioning from a First to Third World continent because of ‘a systemic crisis: financial, economic, social and political.’
In the years since Europe has sunk further into apathy. It has become unproductive, uncreative and workshy, weaned on the welfare state. It hates Trump and his team because they see in them everything that they aren’t: bold, ambitious and resolute. Their plan is to make America Great Again. Europeans know it’s too late for them.
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