KOBLENZ, Germany ��Europe's populist right predicted that Donald Trump's presidency will herald the end of the old way of doing business in the West.
Anti-establishment politicians including Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front in France, and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party, echoed the combative language of the new U.S. president's inaugural address at a celebratory rally in Koblenz Saturday while Chancellor Angela Merkel was trying to reassure her supporters at a meeting in the country's industrial heartland.
Le Pen and her allies are spearheading the most sustained challenge to Europe's status quo since the end of the Cold War, with elections scheduled this year in Germany, France and the Netherlands. While a meeting of the populist right would once have been dismissed as a sideshow, Trump's unexpected rise and Britain's's decision to leave the European Union in a referendum last year have focused investors' concerns on the where the next threat to the EU might emerge.
"The first major hit on the old order was Brexit," Le Pen said at a meeting of supporters in Koblenz's conference center. EU countries will soon "leave the prison of Europe," she said, calling Merkel's decision to let almost a million migrants into Germany last year "a catastrophe." Trump has called the decision "a catastrophic mistake."
Le Pen said every member of the Eurozone must have the possibility of leaving and that the shared currency is "destroying" the French economy.
Though Merkel chose to visit an art gallery near Berlin rather than follow Friday's inauguration live, she has been poring over old interviews and video of Trump, seeking clues on how to influence him when they first meet, according to two people familiar with her preparations.
Trump "made his convictions clear" in his inaugural speech, Merkel said at a conference of her party in Baden-Wuerttemberg, insisting that the trans-Atlantic relationship "won't be less important in the coming years than in the past."
Merkel, a Christian Democrat who has led Europe's biggest economy for more than 11 years, is running for a fourth term as chancellor in September. She is trying to fend off a challenge from the anti-European Alternative for Germany, which has risen to third place in the polls by channeling discontent with her immigration policy.
"We must have the courage to rethink Europe and Europe's freedom," Frauke Petry, co-leader of the AfD, said in her speech in Koblenz.
British Prime Minister Theresa May will be the first foreign leader to meet the new president, perhaps next week, according to reports in British newspapers. May said in an interview with the Financial Times that she expects "very frank" talks and that she'll stress her desire for a strong Europe and a proposed U.S.-Britain trade deal.
