United States President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) drive is reverberating in Europe through a culture war that is being supported by political allies, a new report has found.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) released a report on Tuesday on European sentiment, which found that Trump was pushing allies in European politics.
However, the sense of belonging in the European Union remains strong. “In several countries, public and political appreciation for the EU is growing — not necessarily out of idealism, but from a pragmatic belief that collective action matters in a volatile world,” the report found.
“The early months of Trump’s presidency likely turbocharged this. They seem to have clarified the very values, such as rule of law and protection of fundamental rights, that many citizens want Europe to embody,” it added.
The report explains that as EU leaders come together to solidify a shared identity, Trump is attempting to undermine that through a culture war on the definition of the collective identity.
“These are the high-drama ideological battles over migration, climate, ‘wokeism’ and free speech. This is the struggle over which debates dominate European politics and the meaning of ‘Western values’,” the report outlined.
Author of the report and ECFR senior policy fellow, Pawel Zerka, said Trump’s culture war on Europe was most evident through exclusions from talks on the future of Ukraine during the war with Russia and ongoing trade negotiations.
“Europe has incredible strengths that should allow it to thrive rather than suffer in a world order whose destabilisation has been accelerated by the US president. And the culture war with Trump’s America offers it an opportunity to prove it,” Zerka said.
However, the report explained that the reason why Trump can exploit these ideological battles is that European leaders have “real or imagined dependencies on the US”.
The study portrayed the EU as the main character, Truman Burbank, of the film The Truman Show, which tells the story of a man who is unaware that his life is being filmed and televised live.
It argued that, like Burbank, the bloc spends more of its time responding to crises orchestrated by Trump than setting its own agenda.
Andre Wilkens, director of the European Cultural Foundation, said leaders needed to think about the cultural attachment to Europe.
“Only then will leaders of political parties be able to frame their electoral strategies in ways that respond to people’s genuine attachment to Europe – thus limiting the appeal of Trump’s ideological allies in their countries,” Wilkens said.
