There are once again proclamations that the political tide in Europe is turning against the empire, part of an anti-globalist wave toppling governments in Austria and Germany, and even reaching across the Atlantic to sweep away the likes of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read this prediction. Evidence cited this time in Europe is the collapse of the Austrian government and possible ascendance of the “right wing, pro-Putin” Herbert Kickl, setbacks for the globalists in Croatia elections, as well as billionaire Trump sidekick Elon Musk’s boosting of the Alternative for Germany.
The fact that European voters are increasingly choosing candidates that are opposed to Project Ukraine and favor better ties with Russia is surely a good sign. A Musk and Trump spotlight could also make it more difficult for the EU and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to use “tools” to browbeat governments into submission on the question of Russia or encourage national governments like that of Romania to cancel elections when a candidate favoring better ties with Moscow unexpectedly comes out on top.
And yet one key question remains: will we see a marked difference in the vassalage to the US or simply more of an alignment with the incoming Trump administration?
I’m not sure the anti-globalist label applies all that well to the political parties making waves in Europe, which are not, after all, opposed to global capital, transatlanticism, or the EU.
They are largely a response to the Europe-wide economic downturn driven largely by the disastrous war against Russia. And years of rising immigration combined with low economic growth and austerity have predictably led to improved polling for candidates who are opposed, in theory, to immigration.
They are not all that concerned with neoliberalism, oligarchy, transnational capital, or even militarism. They are also not challenging the fact that Europe is reliant on Washington economically, militarily, and for energy.
And so what does that mean for the citizens of Europe?
For clues let’s look at one of these “anti-globalists” who has been in power for a few years already. She reportedly has Trump’s — and Musk’s — ear and is therefore Politico’s most powerful European politician for 2025. Her response to such a designation?
“…as Spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility.”
The Melonization of Europe
Meloni was recently feted at Mar-a-Lago:
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has just arrived at Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/VA1A1QswnI
— AlexandruC4 (@AlexandruC4) January 5, 2025
And there’s now a belief that she’s entered the emperor’s inner circle:
BREAKING. According to reports, Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni is secretly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump. Foreign minister Tajani was reportedly kept in the dark about her trip. But Elon Musk’s man in Italy posted this before everyone else. So, unlike Tajani, he knew… pic.twitter.com/Uum2mqmp2B
— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) January 4, 2025
What does Meloni’s welcoming into the emperor’s inner circle signify for Europe? Let’s take a brief look at her record.
Meloni encapsulates the European nationalist upstarts in recent years who have quickly abandoned their rebel bona fides in order to be welcomed into the halls of power. The Sweden Democrats and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in The Netherlands are not dissimilar. In the latter case, the Dutch government of which Wilders party is the largest member continues to do Washington’s bidding against China even though it means running Europe’s most valuable tech company into the ground. Even France’s Marine Le Pen was heading down the Meloni path taking a more pro-NATO line before being sidelined by Macron maneuvers.
Meloni followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, unelected former Goldman Sachs executive and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, in her support for Project Ukraine. Draghi was an early architect of the economic war against Moscow and grand plans to turn Italy into an energy hub. Both have failed despite Meloni’s best efforts to carry them forward. The ensuing inflation and destruction of industry have had predictable results and continue a long, ugly trend for Italy:
Italy’s real wage misery: inflation-adjusted wages in 2023 were 4.4% lower than in 1990. Even real wages in Greek performed a little better. pic.twitter.com/rRN9QE4JE7
— Philipp Heimberger (@heimbergecon) July 3, 2024
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Of course, most European workers have started to experience the same over the past three years. The Meloni government carries on with its tepid support for Project Ukraine despite the opposition from the Italian public:
Nevertheless, following her visit to Mar-a-Lago, Meloni had the following to say about the war:
“I have always maintained that the only way to force Russia to sit at the negotiating table was to construct a difficult situation” on the ground, she said. Trump’s first presidency showed he has the ability to “mix diplomacy and deterrence,” she added, predicting it will be the same this time around. Abandoning Ukraine at this point, she said, “would be an error.”
That doesn’t inspire confidence about finding an agreement with Moscow, although it’s unclear how much Meloni’s views represent Trump’s thinking.
If that’s the line she’s pushing, however, she’s not all that different from the Macrons, Starmers, Scholzs, and Trudeas, albeit with different branding. And Meloni is like them in more ways than just on Ukraine.
While her and her government are decidedly “anti-woke” and champion “family values”, they also spend a considerable amount of time working to depict WWII-era Italian fascists as victims of commie anti-Italian racism, blame immigrants for Italy’s woes while still bringing in enough to supply cheap labor, and continue the strip mining of Italy. Last year the Meloni government sold off the fixed-line network of Telecom Italia to New York-based private equity firm KKR, which includes former CIA director David Petraeus as a partner. Elsewhere “Italy Is For Sale,” with tens of billions worth of privatizations planned for the state rail company Ferrovie dello Stato, Poste Italiane, Monte dei Paschi bank and energy giant Eni. The firesale is necessitated by more tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as more than billions of euros Rome has burned through in order to address the loss of pipeline gas from Russia, which includes buying more US LNG.
A lot to like there from the perspective of a US oligarch. So it’s easy to see why Trump, Meloni and Musk get on so well — even if there are indeed some differences on Ukraine but no doubt Trump will be calling the shots there.
As a reward for being a dutiful subject, Italy is getting a major SpaceX deal. In return the “nationalist” Meloni only has to surrender more of Italy’s sovereignty.. Musk’s company will be providing security services, including encryption services, to the Italian public sector.
So it would appear that despite all the talk about anti-globalists coming to power in a Europe that Team Trump supposedly wants to extricate itself from, a few things remain the same: the king’s court in Washington expects dutiful subjects in Europe, and in return they might receive rewards.
Musk and the AfD
Musk is also bestowing gifts upon the Alternative for Germany (AfD), encouraging Germans to vote for the party. On its face it might seem a strange turn for an AfD that purportedly favors reclaiming German sovereignty from the EU and NATO to accept assistance from the world’s richest man who happens to also be well-connected with US spooks. Then again, the AfD received its seed money from a reclusive billionaire descendant of prominent Nazis so maybe it’s what one would expect.
While the current political class in Berlin has run the country into the ground and its efforts to silence the AfD, shame its voters, and keep it from power by any means necessary are undemocratic, I view Musk’s sudden involvement not as a victory for Germany, but as an effort to bring the AfD into the US/NATO fold.
That shouldn’t be that difficult. Aside from the AfD’s stated hesitancy about serving American interests — the embrace of Musk might signal a willingness to be flexible there — there really isn’t much difference between the AfD and the European “center” anymore. Last week’s audio livestream alongside party co-leader Alice Weidel on X included an alarming — and telling — ignorance about the history of fascism and communism:
Elon Musk and Alice Weidel (of the far-right German AfD party) put their brains together for a discussion:
Weidel: “The National Socialists (Nazis) were socialist. Adolf Hitler was a socialist.”
Musk: “Yeah, they nationalized industries like crazy.”
Weidel: “He was a… pic.twitter.com/TmDzHqTidM
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) January 9, 2025
Under Musk and Weidel’s telling, the Meloni government’s selling off state-owned industry to American private equity is a noble undertaking as it’s apparently the opposite of what Hitler would do. No doubt, Germany should follow Meloni’s lead.
Musk and Weidel are propagating a historical view that fits right in with Atlanticists who have been so busy for so long trying to equate WWII-era Nazism and communism. While originally more of a fringe view, it started to go more mainstream in 2008 when the European Parliament adopted a resolution establishing August 23 as the “European Day of Remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism” — effectively equating the two Also called Black Ribbon Day, the US in 2019 adopted a resolution to observe the date.
The same year, the European Parliament went even further and adopted a resolution “on the importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” It proclaims that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was responsible for World War II, and consequently that Soviet Russia is as guilty of the war as Nazi Germany.
No matter that the pact, from the Soviet perspective, was agreed to in order to buy itself time seeing as Poland, France and other European states refused to ally with the USSR. If anyone should share more of the blame it would be the West, which preferred Nazism to communism and hoped Hitler would turn the Nazi war machine against the Soviet Union, which he of course did, resulting in 25 million Russian deaths.
Even the nowadays-Russophobic Guardian published an opinion piece by Seumas Milne back in 2009 that admitted this:
…the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar “enslavement” of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius’s Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as “fighters for independence”.
Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: “People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries’ participation in mass murder.”
So with Weidel and Musk’s history lesson we see yet again that there isn’t much light between the “center” and the “far right” except the latter is at least willing to consider good relations with present-day Russia so as to not harm their own economic interests. Trump might be willing to allow that. Elsewhere, they are both in agreement on the broad outlines of militarism and neoliberalism.
Let’s not forget there is another upstart party in Germany who, like the AfD, is also labeled a populist Putin stooge. Its leader has had pie slammed in her face, fake blood thrown on her and is widely derided in the media for opposing the deployment of US medium range missiles in Germany and Berlin’s subservience to Washington. And yet the world’s richest man is not offering Sahra Wagenknecht a helping hand.
Is that because her party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) doesn’t have a small core of supporters who are neo Nazis or because her economic policies would favor the working class over the likes of Musk — or both?
Despite all the media efforts to lump Wagenknecht and the AfD together as Kremlin-controlled, anti-democratic far-right threats, the parties are largely polar opposites. Just a few examples:
- BSW proposes a fairer tax system that benefits the working class, such as the demand for an excess profits tax in the industrial sector. The AfD wants to slash taxes across the board, including those that are progressive and serve to redistribute wealth, such as the inheritance tax
- BSW believes in global warming and wants to continue to take climate action but work to soften the economic blow to the working class. The AfD rejects climate science. In its EU election manifesto, it says that the “claim of a threat through human-made climate change” is “CO2 hysterics,” and it would do away with climate laws that reduce prosperity and freedoms.
- BSW wants to strengthen the social safety net. The AfD stresses the limits of the state’s role.
A German government supported by and run for the interests of a strong working class coalition wouldn’t have to worry about the likes of Musk. Of course Germany wouldn’t be in the position it is in at all because it wouldn’t have been bought off by Americans, but it is now in position of living by the US oligarchs and largely dying by the US oligarchs. As of now, the next German government looks likely to be headed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is again not that far apart from the AfD — likely to finish second in the February election although probably not strong enough to force its way into a coalition government — aside from the formers belligerence towards Russia and devotion to NATO.
The Musk embrace of the AfD is potentially part of a “suggestion” from the US that the CDU consider forming a coalition with the AfD. If that’s the case, Weidel and company might owe a few favors.
You’d think European anti-globalists and nationalists would be turning and running from the US and the likes of Musk or at least working like mad to find ways to counter American influence. And yet through one of the most magical witches’ brews ever concocted — some combination of bribes, threats, short-sighted self interest, and propaganda — the European political class clings to what is hollowing out their countries.
Perhaps this time it results in a welcome end to Project Ukraine, but the line of thinking that Trump will come in and some new alignment of Orban, Fico, the real Meloni, and company will bring better days seems like wishful thinking at best.
It’s more likely that putative nationalists like Meloni and company are able to rebrand Europe’s vassalage and neoliberalism as some sort of victory against the grating virtue signalling of the Davos cabal while continuing to assist the US in the plundering of Europe.
