The biggest threat facing Europe is not a Trump invasion. It’s his global political revolution | Mark Leonard

European governments are terrified of Donald Trump’s threats on trade, Greenland and the future of Nato. But the biggest threat is not that Trump invades an ally or leaves Europe at the mercy of Russia. It is that his ideological movement could transform Europe from the inside.

A year after Trump’s return to the White House, his “second American revolution” is radiating outward into Europe. The Epstein files reveal how this began clumsily in 2018 with Steve Bannon; but it has become a much more sophisticated partnership with the second coming of Trump and the rise to power of JD Vance. The US National Security Strategy published by the White House in November called for strengthening the growing influence of “patriotic” European parties such as Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), Fidesz in Hungary and Vox in Spain. As with the communist movements of the cold war, these nationalist, populist and in some cases far-right parties are best understood not as isolated national phenomena but as expressions of a shared intellectual project – a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power.

The movement is often portrayed as backward-looking or reactionary, intent on restoring an imagined past. In reality, its strength lies in being radically contemporary – finely tuned to the political, social and intellectual conditions of the 21st century. I have spent the past 18 months trying to understand this movement, talking to everyone from bespectacled Hungarian intellectuals to freshly shaven young RN politicians in France, from Orthodox Jewish political philosophers to Maga diehards in the US. Based on this research, I am convinced that far from being lodged in the past, it is hyper-modern and its standard-bearers have a compelling analysis of the failings of liberal democracy and a pathway to power. Hence the designation “new right”.

Central to the movement’s self-understanding is the claim that liberalism has failed, along with the deeply interdependent globalised order it promoted after the cold war. In its telling, citizens have seen their national cultures and economies battered by an unbroken sequence of shocks that come from liberalisation: the global financial crash of 2008, the eurozone crisis two years later, the refugee crisis of 2015, the Covid pandemic in 2020, and the sharp rise in living costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Each crisis, it argues, has exposed the limits of liberal governance, overwhelmed state capacity and fuelled suspicion about whose interests governments were really serving. Governments rescued the banks, they point out, but cut welfare payments and let people’s homes be repossessed. Ordinary people paid the cumulative price of these crises – through lost jobs, strained services or rising bills – while elites were shielded from the consequences.

One of the most articulate exponents of this view is Benedikt Kaiser, accused of once moving in neo-Nazi circles, who has embraced electoral politics and is becoming one of the leading voices in the AfD’s intellectual ecosystem. Kaiser told me it was the convergence of these crises that had sapped the legitimacy of the postwar liberal order and mainstream parties, providing the essential opening for political insurgents to capture the political agenda.

Off the back of these crises, the movement set out to construct a new electoral coalition, appealing above all to working-class voters who felt they had lost out, experiencing a relative decline in income, security and social standing. This appeal has been distilled into a clear policy agenda spanning immigration, trade, foreign policy and state reform, all bound together by a promise to restore a shared national identity. Borders became a tool for distinguishing the “real” members of the nation from outsiders. Tariffs were recast as a way to rebuild domestic production and elevate the dignity of work. Foreign policy was stripped down to a narrowly defined national interest. And institutional resistance was overcome by attacking the “deep state” and discrediting experts as guardians of a discredited liberal order.

The political centre must reinvent itself as the real defenders of national sovereignty

The success of the new right also rests on its mastery of a fractured media environment – and its use of the algorithmic information space. As the public sphere splintered into online subcultures, it learned to bypass traditional journalism and dominate digital platforms. By advancing a permissive interpretation of “free speech”, it forged alliances with technology magnates such as Elon Musk and saturated the online space with its narratives and slogans. Often armed with “alternative facts” and edgy memes, the new right now dominates the attention economy. I interviewed the US conservative writer Rod Dreher, who cited the case of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a Christian activist who was arrested twice in Birmingham for praying outside an abortion clinic, to illustrate how the mainstream and digital right now inhabit entirely different realities. Although Vaughan-Spruce has become a cult figure in the new-right information sphere, most of the Guardian’s readers will not have heard of her.

Perhaps their most effective manoeuvre has been to force mainstream parties into an unwinnable position – casting them as defenders of elites rather than workers, of continuity rather than change. For too long, established parties downplayed the scale of the threat. When they did respond, they often resorted to mimicking the new right’s divisive rhetoric, particularly on migration. Yet imitation has often had the inverse effect of strengthening the challengers instead of neutralising them.

Any effective response, then, must begin by acknowledging the force of the new right’s critique of liberalism. This must be paired with a political project that speaks to working-class concerns and uses new methods of engagement, an approach that has worked successfully in Denmark and the Netherlands, as well as in Kentucky and New York.

Maybe the clearest lesson comes from figures such as Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, who have realised that their countries’ populists’ association with Trump’s revolution could be a liability for them. Polling conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests that Trumpism could follow a similar trajectory: in country after country, clear majorities now see Trump’s re-election as harmful. If centrist forces wake up to the international threat posed by the second American revolution and rally around a strategy that turns the new right’s strengths into vulnerabilities, there is still a chance that the political centre can reinvent itself as the real defenders of national sovereignty and use the links between new right parties and Trump to defeat them.

Mark Leonard is the author of the report The new right: anatomy of a global political revolution. He is director of the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations