One would expect Tino Chrupalla, the co-chair of Germany’s ascendant right-wing populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to declare his ardent support for everything that U.S. President Donald Trump is doing. After all, the AfD shares MAGA’s contempt for immigrants, “wokeness,” and the European Union.

But then came the war in Iran. In a recent TV interview, Chrupalla accused the Americans of committing “war crimes,” specifically citing alleged attacks on a girls’ school and civilian infrastructure. The AfD leader’s comments didn’t come as a complete surprise, considering his earlier criticisms of Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, when he accused the White House of “Wild West methods.”

One would expect Tino Chrupalla, the co-chair of Germany’s ascendant right-wing populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to declare his ardent support for everything that U.S. President Donald Trump is doing. After all, the AfD shares MAGA’s contempt for immigrants, “wokeness,” and the European Union.

But then came the war in Iran. In a recent TV interview, Chrupalla accused the Americans of committing “war crimes,” specifically citing alleged attacks on a girls’ school and civilian infrastructure. The AfD leader’s comments didn’t come as a complete surprise, considering his earlier criticisms of Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, when he accused the White House of “Wild West methods.”

“Donald Trump started off as a peace president,” Chrupalla said in early March. “He will end up as a president of war.”

The AfD is not just any party. It has arguably been at the forefront of Trump world’s efforts to gain an ideological foothold in Europe’s biggest democracy. In February 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance made a point of meeting with Alice Weidel, the party’s other co-chair, in the wake of his Europe-bashing speech at the Munich Security Conference. This public support of the AfD by Washington’s second-in-command scandalized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other mainstream German politicians, who regard the AfD and its anti-immigrant, pro-Russian ideology as beyond the pale. Elon Musk has given Weidel generous exposure on his social media platform X and even attended an AfD rally by video, calling the party “the best hope for Germany.”

How quaint that all seems now. Just a few months ago, it was still possible to believe in the dream of a Europe refashioned in MAGA’s image—along the lines of Steve Bannon’s idea of a populist international (called “the Movement”) that would unite all of the continent’s far-right insurgents under U.S. tutelage.

Yet Bannon failed to consider the variable that had the greatest potential to scuttle the whole enterprise: Trump himself. The president’s aggressive attacks on Danish sovereignty over Greenland, rogue military raid to depose Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and launch of another massive U.S. war in the Middle East have given his would-be allies in Europe no choice but to bite the little orange hand that feeds them.

In an address in January, Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, railed against Trump’s Greenland threats and the attack on Venezuela, chiding the United States for “a return to imperial ambitions” and a world in which “the law of the strongest trumps respect of international rules.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, another European populist hailed by MAGA as a potential partner, called the U.S. attack on the girls’ school in Iran a “massacre” and denounced the Israeli-U.S. campaign as “outside the scope of international law.”

Others find that the campaign against Iran has tied them in knots. Initially praising the war, British far-right leader and longtime Trump fan Nigel Farage has since declared that Britain is better off staying out of it. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a particularly privileged MAGA client, has tried to avoid criticizing Trump too directly without accepting the war. The head of Italy’s League party, Matteo Salvini—who once lauded Trump for breaking with interventionism—has now been forced into a humiliating climb-down. “We always prefer the diplomatic way,” a League official said.

All of these politicians evidently understand something that has eluded Trump: In Europe, supporting U.S. wars is a great way to get yourself voted out of office. Today’s populists were happy to enjoy the benefits of MAGA’s attention as long as they could point to the president’s alleged anti-imperialism. But his bully behavior against Denmark, his bloodthirsty rhetoric, and his enthusiastic embrace of military force are turning out to be too much for even the hardiest Trump supporters. Denouncing Brussels for its alleged violations of national sovereignty is a core value for most Euro-populists. That doesn’t leave much room for rationalizing an arbitrary U.S. grab for Greenland.

The situation of the European far right bears an ironic resemblance to the far left’s predicament during the Cold War. The Soviet regime placed great hopes in Europe’s Marxist-Leninist parties. Immediately after World War II, Soviet-style ideology enjoyed widespread appeal across Europe. The French Communist Party won roughly 25 percent of the vote in the 1945 election and joined a government coalition the year after. The Italian Communist Party, which won as much as one-third of the vote in one postwar election, remained the continent’s biggest for years. Moscow’s authoritarianism and economic mismanagement steadily undermined its appeal. But nothing eroded its support as dramatically as its military suppression of popular uprisings in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Now, the military adventures of a U.S. president who once vowed to end “forever wars” are having a similar effect. The populist right in Europe has figured out that it can go on pursuing its anti-immigrant and anti-Brussels agendas without paying obeisance to the man in the Oval Office.

In reality, relations between the MAGA crowd and their European counterparts have never been as frictionless as both sides would like to pretend. The French in particular—Marine Le Pen and her successor, Bardella—have never really managed to conceal their contempt for the crassness of Trump’s entourage. Last year, Bardella canceled a planned speech to a conservative gathering in the United States after accusing Bannon of giving a Nazi salute at a presentation. AfD criticisms of Bannon go all the way back to 2018, when one of the party’s leaders, Alexander Gauland, sneered at Bannon’s plans to turn European populists into a MAGA subsidiary: “Mr. Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections.” As Gauland seemed to imply at the time, the continent’s far-right parties are actually more diverse and have more diverging interests than outsiders tend to realize.

Gauland may also have been alluding to the long and deep history of anti-U.S. sentiment in Europe, especially among populist parties on both right and left. The United States stands for all those things that stir up the blood of the far right in particular: racial diversity, feminism, capitalism, Jews, and generally the Other. French voters, in particular, would never countenance a candidate straightforwardly aligned with the Americans. Recent polls show that the U.S. president’s profound unpopularity among Europeans also extends to the far right. That’s why a MAGA alliance was probably always doomed, even if Trump hadn’t become a militarist.

Yet none of that, of course, prevented the European far right from seeking Trump’s approval in the past. The AfD, in particular, has relied on Washington’s interference to prevent it from being banned back home in Germany. The rift could have lasting effects—or it might not. Given the opportunism that the right-wing populists have shown over the years, a rapprochement with MAGA can’t be excluded.

Bannon, though, embodies another lingering challenge for Trump’s efforts to build support among the European far right: MAGA doesn’t really have any messengers who might appeal to audiences on the other side of the pond. Even when the communists were running low on ideological appeal, they could still call on relatively sexy celebs such as Paul Robeson and Che Guevara. MAGA boasts—well, who, exactly? Vance or Richard Grenell? The former will long be unfavorably remembered by the Europeans for his condescending speech in Munich last year, as well as for a grotesque visit to Greenland. The latter, who served as a notoriously obnoxious U.S. ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term, left a legacy of ill feeling that will probably take years to erase.

This public relations problem wasn’t helped by the release of the latest tranche of documents from the Epstein files last month. Several messages showed Bannon boasting to Jeffrey Epstein in 2018 and 2019 about his efforts to support the far right—including claims that he was “focused on raising money for LePen and Salvini so they can actually run full slates.”

It goes without saying that no modern-day populist leader in Europe will want to be seen in such grubby company. But such are the gifts that MAGA bestows on its friends.