Trump Wanted a European MAGA but May Get an Anti-American Europe

On Sunday, September 6, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) came closer to outright power than any far-right party in the history of the postwar Federal Republic. It won 43.8 percent of the vote and 39 of the 83 seats in Saxony-Anhalt’s state parliament—more than doubling its 20.8 percent showing in 2021 and falling just three seats short of an absolute majority. The result forces Germany to confront the precarity of its democracy. It should also compel the Trump administration to reckon with the consequences of its support for the AfD.

President Donald Trump has spent years attacking Europe’s political center and encouraging far-right nationalist parties that seek to destroy it. His administration appears to believe that these movements constitute a European branch of MAGA: compatriots in a shared struggle against migration, climate policy, gender politics, Brussels, and the European establishment.

Saxony-Anhalt exposes the delusion at the heart of that strategy. The Trump administration has mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment. The parties it helps empower may share mutual enemies, but they do not share American interests, or even the interests of this administration. That tension runs deeper than misalignment over NATO defense spending, though the AfD stakes out hostile positions on burden sharing. It increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization itself—against a political and economic order that, in its telling, elevates the interests of Washington over Berlin.

This worldview does not reject every American. The AfD admires the Trump administration precisely because it repudiates the traditional tenets of American power the AfD so despises—the America of liberal universalism, globalized markets, and multiculturalism. In this way, the AfD identifies with the Trump administration because it has acted as an insurgent against Americanism. Such a distinction should alarm the AfD’s interlocutors in Washington. The Trump administration may believe it has found ideological kin; instead, it is legitimizing a political party that regards American influence as the ultimate source of Germany’s cultural and strategic subordination.

The AfD welcomes Trump’s support—at least partially, and from the comfort of a safe rhetorical distance. But as the party grows, the administration’s embrace of its most radical elements threatens to further weaken American influence in Europe.

The rise of the AfD

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, though not himself on the ballot, entered September’s election cycle leading a federal coalition of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) whose public support has eroded with remarkable speed. Saxony-Anhalt marks the first of three statewide tests for his coalition this month, with Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin set to vote on September 20.

In August, only 13 percent of Germans expressed satisfaction with his government; Merz’s own approval stood at just 14 percent. At the same time, the AfD polled a record 28 percent nationally, seven points ahead of the CDU and 16 points ahead of the SPD. The Social Democrats, co-led by Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, languished at 12 percent. Those numbers describe more than an unpopular government; they reveal a political center that no longer commands confidence in its ability to govern.

The SPD’s remarkable collapse in support offers the clearest evidence. In Germany’s most recent federal election, in 2025, the CDU/CSU received the largest single transfer of SPD voters: 1.76 million. But the insurgent right and left claimed almost as many. The SPD lost 720,000 voters to the AfD, 560,000 to Die Linke, and 440,000 to the newly minted left-nationalist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—a combined 1.72 million voters. In contrast, only 100,000 moved to the Greens. The SPD’s old coalition did not remain in the political center; it fractured toward the margins.

That political extremes captured nearly half of SPD defectors reveals something fundamental about Germany’s revolt against the center: The AfD and the far left offer profoundly different visions of society, but they draw sustenance from a related rebellion against the political economy of Atlanticism. The far left describes that order as a broken system that subordinates labor to the power of capital, elected governments to financial markets, and Europe to American military power. The AfD describes it as a post-national system that dissolves historically rooted communities into units of globalization. One speaks the language of class; the other speaks about nation, culture, and belonging.

Where the AfD excels is in offering an emotionally resonant account of disruption, weaving economic stagnation, migration, climate policy, and foreign affairs into a broader indictment of the political center. It attacks NATO spending targets, sanctions, and energy policy as projects through which a cosmopolitan elite is imposing burdens on ordinary Germans that it never expects to bear itself. These are not discrete issues; they form part of a larger claim that Germany has ceded control over the forces shaping its future. In that telling, the United States becomes the global puppeteer. Björn Höcke, the dominant figure in the AfD’s radical eastern wing, made the point with unusual candor this summer. He described western Germans as “German-speaking Americans” who had pliantly allowed American culture to replace their national identity. East Germans, he argued, had remained genuinely German. “Americanism,” he declared, was the antithesis of Germanness.

Höcke is not alone. AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla has called Merz and other establishment politicians “America’s vassals.” The charge fuses foreign policy with domestic grievance: German leaders answer to forces abroad, Chrupalla inveighs, while ordinary Germans live with the economic fallout.

The Trump administration did not create Germany’s political crisis; German leaders managed that for themselves. But it has deepened the economic pressures destroying the center by launching a war of choice in Iran, legitimized the AfD by welcoming its leaders to Washington, and openly antagonized the Atlanticist politicians who sustain Washington’s strategic position among increasingly skeptical European publics. Said otherwise, the Trump administration supplied the accelerants.

Weaponizing a broken bargain

For three decades, Germany built prosperity around an export machine sustained by wage restraint and weak domestic demand at home, cheap Russian energy, and buoyant foreign demand from China. Between 1995 and 2007, exports accounted for roughly 85 percent of all German economic growth.

That bargain no longer holds. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended the era of Russian pipeline gas. Chinese firms increasingly compete with German manufacturers in the very sectors that once powered Berlin’s economy, while Trump’s tariffs weaken the open trading system on which the model rests. And now, the war with Iran has delivered another energy shock: Eurozone inflation reached 3.3 percent in August, while German energy prices rose 10.5 percent from a year earlier.

Merz and Klingbeil have responded with labor reforms that expand fixed-term contracts and ease termination rules. Whatever their economic merits, the politics are perilous. A government that asks people already hurting to make further sacrifices while financing a generational defense buildup gives the AfD a clear line of attack.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, plays both arsonist and cheerleader: It aggravates the insecurity on which the AfD feeds, then congratulates the party for feeding on it. Yet a closer look at what the administration is empowering should give pause. The AfD has called for reciprocal tariffs against further American trade barriers, attacked Germany’s dependence on U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), and called for renewed Russian energy imports. These are not the positions of a European MAGA auxiliary; they amount to a program for loosening the very ties through which Washington exercises influence.

The AfD increasingly thinks globally. The party turns resentment toward the old trans-Atlantic bargain into a case for a different geopolitical alignment. Its 2024 European election manifesto endorses German participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s vast infrastructure project for expanding its global influence, and advocates for Berlin to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an observer state—alongside closer engagement with the Eurasian Economic Union, the Moscow-led trading bloc that includes Kazakhstan and Belarus. The AfD’s answer to a fraying American-led order, in other words, is not German autonomy so much as a strategic reorientation toward the powers seeking to displace it.

Biting the hand that feeds

Nationalists, by definition, do not make natural international allies. Across Europe, parties that once flaunted their affinity with the Trump administration now distance themselves from the unpopular war in Iran, punitive tariffs, and insistence that allies follow Washington’s lead. In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen has warned of the war’s “catastrophic consequences,” and Jordan Bardella has condemned the Trump administration’s “imperial ambitions.” AfD co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla have, likewise, warned that the war’s destabilization of the Middle East runs contrary to German interests. Their retreat reflects less a reversal than a return to first principles. The AfD may admire Trump as an insurgent, but German nationalism ultimately demands emancipation from American power.

Still, the Trump administration’s allies view the AfD’s ascent as an opportunity. They see the party and its counterparts as shock troops in a civilizational war. Agreement on immigration, Christianity, gender, and climate animates their friendship. The administration may share their hostility toward Ukraine, NATO, and much of the European establishment, but the AfD’s nationalism ultimately points somewhere more consequential. A party that touts a more sovereign, potentially nonaligned Germany will find itself at odds with American interests on defense spending, China strategy, and energy.

The Trump administration’s defenders will answer that it wants Europeans to assume responsibility for their defense. Perhaps that is true. Fewer American obligations may constitute a legitimate strategic goal. But fewer obligations also bring less leverage, less access, and fewer dependable partners. An alliance cannot become purely transactional without also becoming less reliable. Nationalism creates competitors, and the AfD will seek to shape Germany and Europe on its own terms.

Nor does the AfD necessarily offer the bargain that the Trump administration’s burden-sharing argument assumes. Its foreign policy leadership opposed NATO’s 5 percent spending target, arguing that Germany should determine its own military needs. The party couples its vision of a stronger Germany with interest-based ties to China and Russia alike, including support for deeper engagement with institutions centered on Beijing and Moscow. That is not simply Europe doing more so America can do less; it represents a fundamental rupture. A future AfD government, perhaps in coalition after Germany’s 2029 federal elections, could conceivably obstruct key American European priorities, from burden sharing to energy policy.

Conclusion

The Trump administration has been convinced that Europe’s Atlanticist leaders governed weak, ungrateful societies that had exploited American generosity. But they may leave office having demonstrated what that relationship meant in practice. The Atlanticists the administration seems to delight in humiliating are not America’s freeloaders; they rank among its greatest strategic assets. In attacking them, the Trump administration has not built a European MAGA, but rather helped advance those who seek to undermine American power.