Donald and Elon — The European Far Right’s Most Inconvenient Allies.

@Studio Graphique France Média Monde

It is one of those ironies one hesitates to point out too loudly, for fear of waking the beast. But it deserves to be said plainly: Donald Trump and Elon Musk, those twin totems of American disruption, may well be the most effective brake on the advance of Europe’s far right — not because they oppose it, but because they expose it.

They are, each in his own way, a warning wrapped in noise.

Trump, with his theatrical vulgarity and instinctive hostility to anything resembling restraint, has taken populism far beyond the grumbling nationalism of Europe’s reactionaries. He doesn't flirt with chaos — he courts it. His disdain for institutions, his indulgence in conspiracy, his almost baroque contempt for legality: it is all quite operatic. One is almost tempted to admire the performance, were it not so real.

Musk, meanwhile, plays the enfant terrible of the technosphere — part Howard Hughes, part Ayn Rand, with the attention span of a caffeinated algorithm. He proclaims liberty as though it were a private property, dismantles norms with a shrug, and gives his platform over to a parade of cranks and nihilists, all in the name of "free speech." He is, in short, the billionaire as provocateur — and, as such, a useful cautionary tale.

Now place these two in contrast with Europe’s far-right standard-bearers — Le Pen, Wilders, Meloni. However radical their language may once have been, they have, in recent years, wrapped themselves in the garb of respectability. They speak of order, not upheaval. They praise the State, albeit a pared-down, patriotic one. They do not call for insurrection, nor do they openly mock the judiciary. Their revolution is to be a quiet one — with tricolores, perhaps, but not torches.

But beside Trump and Musk, their moderation appears not only strategic, but necessary. Because the spectacle across the Atlantic is, quite simply, terrifying. The message it sends is: this is where your populism ends if you don’t clip its wings. An electorate may be angry, yes — but not foolish. Europe has not forgotten the price of demagoguery.

In this sense, Trump and Musk act less like allies of the European far right than like its saboteurs. They render the movement radioactive by association. They raise the temperature so high that even those sympathetic to nationalist rhetoric begin to crave cool heads. The more Trump shouts, the more Musk tweets, the more attractive competence becomes.

That, perhaps, is the final irony: that these two agents of disruption may end up preserving the very order they despise. They play the part of the monster so convincingly that the villagers turn back toward the castle, battered though it may be, and say, “Better the flawed than the feral.”

So let them rant. Let them threaten and posture and break things for the cameras.

From our side of the Atlantic, their chaos may be the best campaign material the European centre has had in years.

Eric Lambert 25/03/2025