BRUSSELS – As Europe enters 2026, it feels disillusioned and threatened. Across the continent, populist right parties are rising and adopting a style of bombastic populism that echoes Donald Trump’s political playbook: performative outrage, relentless attacks on elites and institutions, and a promise to restore lost national greatness.
Once-marginal movements in Europe have shed their outsider status to become plausible contenders for real political power – not only in Hungary and Italy, where they have been in government for years, but increasingly in France, Germany and even rippling into UK politics.
While some are cautious about overtly aligning with Trump, especially as he is increasingly threatening European countries, they are nonetheless aping his methods. And what was once dismissed as protest politics is embedded in mainstream politics.
“I fear the far-right has a strong chance of seizing power in several key EU countries,” Janis Emmanouilidis, deputy chief executive of the European Policy Centre (EPC), told The i Paper.
The question that hangs over Europe is not whether these parties can break through but what happens if they do.
Italy and Hungary are the most obvious examples of how the extremes have seized the reins of power. In Rome, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, the Brothers of Italy, has evolved from a post-fascist fringe into a governing force with genuine administrative responsibility. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s long tenure has shown how far-right governance can reshape a country’s political institutions, business environment and national identity.
In Europe’s big three countries, France, Germany and Britain, the populist right dominates the political discourse without yet governing, but in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is leading in the polls, regularly outpacing traditional parties, and it has steamrolled its way into the centre of political conversation.
Some European countries are cautious about overtly aligning with Trump (Photo: Luis M. Alvarez/AP)As in Trump’s America, the strategy is less about detailed policy than about dominating attention, framing politics as a cultural conflict and portraying institutions as obstacles to “the people’s will”.
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is a firm challenger. In recent polls, it has led in parts of Saxony and Thuringia and hovered near the top of national vote intentions.
Its success lies not only in what it proposes, but in how it communicates – provocative, polarising and media-savvy in ways that closely resemble Trump-era campaigning (helped by explicit support from the likes of US Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk).
In the UK, Reform’s populist agenda mirrors that of Trump-style populism elsewhere: scepticism toward elites, hostility to migration, and a combative stance toward established media and institutions. Its success is built less on experience than on grievance, disruption and the promise to smash a political system portrayed as corrupt and detached.
“For over a decade, nationalist movements have gnawed at the edges of Europe’s political mainstream… while remaining excluded from real power,” said Grégoire Roos, director of Chatham House’s Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes.
Protesters holding a poster during a demonstration in Paris in 2025, as part of the international day against racism and fascism (Photo: Magali Cohe/ Hans Lucas/AFP)He added: “With the shrinking of the centre and the emergence of a new generation of voters – for whom an anti-fascist narrative sounds like a vague abstraction – Europe’s populists may have come to maturity.”
The momentum has been amplified by transatlantic dynamics. Trump’s return to the centre of US politics has provided both inspiration and validation for Europe’s populists. It has also normalised a style of politics that prizes confrontation over compromise, spectacle over substance and permanent campaigning over governance.
European nationalist leaders increasingly borrow from this playbook – attacking courts, journalists and civil servants while casting themselves as the sole authentic voice of the nation.
However, the centre has not yet abandoned hope. “I don’t believe we are losing the fight against the far-right,” Lukas Sieper, a German MEP with the Green party, told The i Paper.
Daniele Albertazzi, co-director of the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey, said that while the far-right is rising, its attitudes are endorsed by only a minority of Europeans.
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What unites these diverse parties is not uniform ideology, but a shared political momentum built on frustration with the old order.
The real test for Europe in 2026 will not be whether these movements can win elections, but whether they can capture the agenda so thoroughly that mainstream parties are forced to mimic them rather than confront them. This is arguably the situation in the US, with first the Tea Party and then the rise of Maga.
For now, the populist right in Europe has succeeded in making its rise feel necessary rather than accidental. But as Trump has demonstrated in the US, once populist bombast becomes the dominant political language, reversing it is far harder than just dismissing it. Europe may soon discover this lesson for itself.
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