The Long Shadow of Trump Over Europe’s Unity

Looking at elections in Latvia and the political turmoil in Romania, MAGA influences Europe’s politics with varying success rates but steadily contributes to increasing strategic divergence. One can read the European Commission proposal to dust off the passerelle clauses exactly in that light.

Latvia delivered a reassuring result on 3 October. Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs’s United List took about 35 per cent of the vote, more than 20 percentage points ahead of Ainārs Šlesers – aka ‘Latvian Trump’, and recorded the best performance by any political force since independence in 1991. Coalition talks will now decide the shape of the government. Kulbergs has ruled out working with Šlesers’s Latvia First, and a majority is within reach with either the National Alliance or the Progressives. The outcome matches the assessment of Roberts Kits in Few Reasons to Worry About Latvian Trump, who argued that Šlesers had only a thin chance of becoming PM.

Romania offers less comfort. PM-designate Siegfried Mureșan lost a confidence vote on 30 September, with182 votes of the 233 required, prolonging a crisis that began when the government of Ilie Bolojan fell on 5 May. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kimberly Guilfoyle, the US ambassador to Greece, told a dinner in Athens in March, referring to the coming collapse in Bucharest, ‘We can do this to any country we want’. On 31 March she met Sorin Grindeanu, leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), in Bucharest. Her lawyer disputes the account and PSD says the talks concerned a gas corridor. George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and a self-declared MAGA ally, has said his people helped fellow nationalist Karol Nawrocki’s presidential campaign in Poland.

Political paralysis of Europe’s decision-making resulting from even more MAGA-sponsored disruptors is easy to imagine. Even more if new EU member states joined the club by reforming its decision-making process on key issues like security, foreign affairs or taxes. In this context, the European Commission’s plan to bypass the unanimity rule that blocks bolder EU moves is a timely response. Leaked documents suggest using passerelle clauses to drop unanimity at the intermediate stages of accession talks and to extend qualified majority voting to sanctions, defence and security. Alexandre Adam, chief adviser to Ursula von der Leyen, who leads this proposal, must have read the 2022 Visegrad Insight report ‘War and the Future of Europe‘, or at least its scenario ‘United European Patchwork’. Our scenario set out this exact possibility.