It was just seven weeks ago when we said the following about Donald Trump and Europe’s increasingly intractable migrant crisis: “Europe’s worsening refugee crisis is in many ways the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.”
The rationale behind that comment should have been obvious, but just in case it’s not, here’s the argument. Trump is campaigning on a lot of things, some of them so incoherent that we’re not entirely sure how to go about describing them, but one key part of his “platform” is a strong border.
“We either have a country, or we don’t folks,” he's particularly fond of saying.
In the first week of his official candidacy, he made America’s porous border with Mexico a key element of the “Trump stump” - if you will - whipping supporters into a frenzy with stories about drug runners and Mexican rapists. His solution: build a wall.
Well it so happens that just a little over two months after Trump made that suggestion, that’s exactly what Hungary’s Viktor Orban did when the daily flow of Mid-East refugees over the Serbian border rose well into the several thousands. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the wall idea seems to work. Here's a look at the dramatic decline in migrants entering Hungary after Orban's razor wire fence was constructed:
Initially that move was seen as cruel and Orban was cast by some as a kind of first European mover in the effort to strip away refugees’ basic human rights in the name of preserving Western Europe’s “Christian heritage.”
Fast forward nine months and the mood has changed. Dramatically. Fears of terrorism, rape, assault, and rampant violence plague everyday life for many Europeans and more European equivalents of Trump’s Mexican border wall have been erected in countries other than Hungary.
In many ways, Trump is the leader many Europeans want, even though most would never say so aloud as it flies in the face of everything the bloc is supposed to stand for and recalls the region’s rather uncomfortable past.
Trump has been called a populist, a nationalist, and at worst, a fascist. All of those movements are once again on the rise in Europe largely as a response to the refugee crisis (just look at PEGIDA, and the Soldiers of Odin). Of course there are still those Europeans who find Trump repugnant - the antithesis of an Angela Merkel.
CBC is out with some interesting commentary on all of the above.
“As hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers continue to land on Europe's shores, and as an opposing sentiment rises, for some, Trump's sturdy wall can't be built here quickly enough,” Foreign Correspondent Nahlah Ayed writes. “The Republican leadership contender's tough talk on migration, on Muslims, and on Europe's approach to both, is giving Trump strange but tangible traction on the non-voting side of the Atlantic.”
Here, for instance is what Jean-Marie Le Pen tweeted late last month:
Si j’étais américain, je voterais Donald TRUMP… Mais que Dieu le protège !
— Jean-Marie Le Pen (@lepenjm) February 27, 2016
And then there is of course the incomparable right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders (see more on Geert here), who said this:
I hope @realDonaldTrump will be the next US President. Good for America, good for Europe. We need brave leaders. pic.twitter.com/FWJSaQdClM
— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) December 7, 2015
"The immigration issue and the position he's taken on Mexico, you know, it resonates with many on the European continent," Peter Trubowitz, director of the London School of Economics' United States Centre told CBC. "They're worried about immigration, worried about refugees and it's probably no surprise that Le Pen endorsed Donald Trump."
On the other side, are those who say Europeans that support Trump are just as misguided as the Americans who have pledged their vote to the bellicose billionaire. Here’s the front page of last month’s Libération. It reads: “the big idiot on the rise.”
And here’s Der Spiegel with the headline: “Madness: America’s Agitator”
Finally, CBC warns that Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin has some Europeans concerned that the US may abandon the “losers” (to use what is by now perhaps the most famous ‘Trumpism’) for someone Trump sees more of himself in.
"The potential for 'President' Donald Trump, who actually sees more in common with Putin than with perhaps (U.K. Prime Minister David) Cameron or Merkel, is frightening,” Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the U.S. and the Americas program at London's Chatham House told Ayed, adding that "Trump is, in some respects, the ultimate caricature of the ugly American in European eyes.”
So, for all the European readers out there we ask: “Idiot, clown, or hero?”
We close with two clips. The first is Trump on Angela Merkel’s migrant policy. The second is the UK Parliament debating a Trump ban.