It’s been a year and two months since Vice President JD Vance delivered his famous speech in Munich, declaring that “the main threat [to Europe comes] from within.” In targeting political elites in general, Vance was aiming specifically to tear down the barriers erected against the far right in Germany. His statement articulated for the first time Donald Trump’s maximalist vision of exporting regime change to all nations of Europe that had not yet moved to the right.
The Trump-Netanyahu Iranian debacle, the dismal polling for U.S. president, the defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and, last week, the White House’s rupture with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni all suggest that this maximalist vision is encountering serious problems. The real regime change, if there ever was one, seems to have gone the othe way, affecting those European leaders who had initially adopted what Gilles Gressani, editor at Le Grand Continent , has defined as a “vassalage project.”
Trump’s break with his Italian ally, even more so than the loss of his Hungarian one, is a taboo-breaking moment in European politics. Anatomy of a Divorce The crisis began last Tuesday when, in a statement to the press, Meloni first announced a freeze in the automatic renewal of a defense cooperation deal with long-time ally Israel. After citing current Middle East conflicts, she declared that Trump’s latest attack on Pope Leo XIV—in which the U.S. president accused the Vatican of being too liberal—was “unacceptable.”
Meloni’s comments, coming from a conservative leader who’d been seen as firmly pro-MAGA and pro-NATO, signaled a further erosion in European support for Trump. Throughout 2024 and 2025, the mainstream media treated the Meloni government as the most stable conservative administration in Europe: living proof that a post-fascist leader could enter the mainstream, stand as a barrier against a perceived woke drift, and at the same time show moderation in foreign policy. Meloni managed all this without any major clashes with Brussels and while remaining firmly at the top of the polls. Since Trump’s reelection, Italy seemed to be Washington’s most reliable ally in the Mediterranean.
After Meloni’s speech, Trump wasted no time in lashing out at his former protége, openly questioning why Italy wasn’t helping secure Iranian oil and casting doubt on Meloni’s leadership. In retrospect, Meloni’s Italy, oriented toward compromise between the two sides of the Atlantic as well as between populist ambitions and mainstream realities, did not resonate at all with the evolving Trumpian revolution.
Lorenzo Castellani, a political scientist at the Luiss University in Rome, has described the relationship between Meloni and Trump as an “ asymmetrical alliance .” Trump issued directives, and Meloni attempted to position herself as a reliable ally while bearing the economic and political consequences of Trump’s erratic behavior. This alliance, like a marriage of unequals, was inherently unstable. Elsewhere in Europe The Trump-Meloni divorce is no outlier. It can’t be explained simply as a result of the Vatican’s influence on Rome or Meloni’s big referendum loss nearly a month ago. In reality, the crisis stems from the increasing toxicity of Trump’s brand in Europe, a growing fatigue with Trump-inspired plebiscitary authoritarianism.
Take Germany, where only 15 percent of voters today consider the United States a reliable partner. For Alternative for Germany , on the far-right, proximity to Washington has become electorally risky, and the party establishment has asked its cadre to stop making political trips to Washington.
Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki , who merited a visit by Kristi Noem to shore up his candidacy last year, is torn. He is caught between acting as a bulwark against Moscow and aligning himself with a U.S. president who is shitposting his way into anti-Catholic blasphemy , whose policies on Russia are quite ambiguous, and who boasts of having cut U.S. funding to Ukraine.
In France, Marine Le Pen has had no choice but to question Trump’s strategy with Tehran’s regime: “What is the final objective? Nobody understands it.”
According to the Trump administration’s plan to build a political bloc with Europe’s anti-Muslim and pro-Israel conservatives, the “patriotic” parties were supposed to be strengthened by the White House brand. The Conservative Political Action Conference network served as an operational tool for this strategy. But today, the U.S. president has lost consensus on almost all issues, from trade to security issues.
The association with Trump, once advantageous, is becoming a political problem for the European right. The U.S. president once provided visibility, language, and imagery to a constellation of small-to-medium European parties. But when it came to actually shifting votes (in Romania , Germany , and indeed Hungary ), the effect proved weak.
This failure has consequences. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić had invested in Orbán as a privileged channel to Washington. Now he finds himself alone . The War in Iran The war in Iran has not only convinced Pope Leo to become more politically vocal. It also contradicted the central promise of “America First”—to avoid conflicts abroad. Undermining the credibility of the MAGA movement, the war has highlighted existing fractures in American conservatism by pitting the populist right against neoconservative hawks .
Those fractures are even more evident now in Europe. European Catholics have long had difficulty understanding the centrality of the doctrine of “just war” for their American counterparts, and they now have even greater difficulty coming to terms with Trump’s political messianism . Meloni’s criticism of Trump’s statements about the Pope are less an expression of national values or humanitarian politics and more a tactical, pragmatic repositioning, due to the political costs of shielding the U.S.-Israel escalations.
The polls for now seem to prove Meloni right, with 81 percent of Italians saying that they agree with her choice of defending the Pope. Another survey finds 79 percent of Italians negatively assessing Trump’s handling of the war in Iran, with a surprising, cross-partisan consensus. Trump’s attack on the prime minister could be just the opportunity for Italy to free itself from a collapsing MAGA project.
The national-conservative wave in Europe is still vigorous, and it still sees Trump as a unique opportunity to challenge Euro-socialism and Marxist hegemony in academia. The anchor of the conservative bloc, however, is shifting, and European parties are beginning to understand how necessary it is to keep their distance. With Israel going through an irrevocable crisis of reputation, an overly close alignment with the American president and his pro-Netanyahu stance risks turning from an opportunity into a trap for the European sovereigntist right. If conservatives in Europe don’t begin to heed domestic public opinion, their alliance with Trump will cease to be an asset and will instead become a source of delegitimization.
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