Trump may be in political trouble. But Trump-style global populism isn’t

President Donald Trump might be in a political hole, but his brand of conservative populist nationalism is flourishing across the globe.

Rising star Flávio Bolsonaro’s shock win in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election Sunday bolstered Trump’s project of remaking the Western Hemisphere in his political image.

Populist right-wingers are also on the march in Europe, fueled by the same failures of foreign leaders to tackle the cost of living and deliver promised change that are haunting US Republicans as the midterm elections draw near.

The radical anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is catapulting into a national force as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government flatlines. France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen is leading the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election.

These parties aren’t Trump clones, and some predate his MAGA movement. But his rise to power and endurance inspire them. And the administration loudly supports its nationalist brethren threatening to topple the centrist European leaders the president meets at international summits.

Supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) arrive for an election campaign rally ahead of state elections on September 18, 2026, in Neubrandenburg, Germany.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Many far-right parties share the populist ethos that powered Trump’s stunning 2016 and 2024 campaigns, embracing protectionist economics and emulating his hostility to elites, globalization and mass immigration.

It would be ironic if right-wing populists peak elsewhere just as Trump’s star fades. But he makes an unlikely lame duck, and may copy other second-term presidents who aggressively tried to imprint their legacies on the world before leaving power.

The strength of conservative populism has conjured an existential moment for leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and his new British counterpart Andy Burnham. Both are leading a fight-back by adopting rhetoric and programs designed to blunt the right and reinforce moderate, centrist government.

But Trump’s violent political shifts seem to be stirring a separate counter-reaction, especially in the United States, as the success of democratic socialists in some midterm primaries heralds a new wave of left-wing populism.

A stunning result in Brazil

Bolsonaro is the eldest son of Trump buddy and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was imprisoned after being convicted of plotting a coup against Brazil’s current leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after 2022 general elections.

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro leaves the DF Star hospital in Brasilia, Brazil, on September 14, 2025, after undergoing a series of medical examinations while under house arrest.

Sergio Lima/AFP/Getty Images/File

Lula has only three weeks before a runoff election to mount a comeback that would stop the most populous Latin American democracy from careening to the right.

Trump will loom large over the second round after Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine and Peter Welch wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month to accuse the administration of using tariffs and economic sanctions to interfere in Brazilian democracy.

Trump, meanwhile, marked Brazil’s Sunday election by casting doubt on America’s democracy, noting that 125 million people voted and results came out the same day, unlike in some US states. “Voting in America is CORRUPT !!!” he posted.

Bolsonaro Jr.’s surprising ascent follows that of Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing insurgent who won Colombia’s presidential election earlier this year. Conservative governments friendly to the White House now rule in Costa Rica, after the election of populist Laura Fernández Delgado, and in El Salvador, Chile and Honduras.

In Argentina, President Javier Milei, the Trump acolyte who gifted a chainsaw to Elon Musk at a conservative conference, benefited from a $20 billion currency swap offer Trump made conditional on voters supporting his party in legislative elections.

Trump is also stamping his influence on the region by propping up the leftist authoritarian Venezuelan regime while concluding oil-exporting deals that critics have styled as 21st-century imperialist plunder.

A new populist tide in Europe

The populist tide may lift one of the right-wing nationalist movement’s most abiding figures in France next year after three previous failed presidential bids. Le Pen has in the past been thwarted by her country’s two-stage electoral system as voters coalesced around moderate rivals. But the collapse of establishment center-right and center-left parties means she may face left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon — whom she’s currently expected to beat — in a runoff.

Le Pen has remodeled her National Rally party, which evolved from the National Front of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. But she still advocates nationalist, anti-immigration, protectionist policies and antipathy to the EU. She’d be the most right-wing French president of the modern era and would shake the establishments in Paris and Brussels just as Trump did in Washington.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen delivers her speech on September 13, 2026, in Henin-Beaumont, northern France.

Jean-Francois Badias/AP

European centrists are even more alarmed by the AfD, since far-right parties court particular notoriety in Germany, which has spent 80 years processing the shame of Nazism.

The AfD is to the right of Le Pen and MAGA, and its critics accuse it of historical denialism, antisemitism and ethno-nationalism. But it’s now the second biggest single party in Germany’s federal legislature.

In 2025, Vice President JD Vance outraged Europeans by meeting the AfD leader Alice Weidel in Munich while warning that immigration was destroying Western civilization. Last month, Trump backed the AfD on social media after a landslide win in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, writing, “THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore!”

Trump has long projected leadership over global populism. He claimed in 2016, for instance, that he “called” Britain’s vote to leave the EU, which was a harbinger of his own populist surge to the presidency a few months later.

But he’s not had things all his own way. Far-right MAGA hero and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán fell from power this year despite Trump’s efforts to save him. And the president’s friendship with another conservative populist, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, soured over the Iran war and his claim that she “begged” him for a selfie.

A counter-populist movement is organizing

Carney reacted to Trump’s demands for Canada to become the 51st state by emerging as an informal leader of the Western democracies in a role vacated by Trump. In January, he warned that at “a time of rising populism and ethnic nationalism, Canada can show how diversity can be a strength, not a weakness.”

Burnham used his speech at the Labour Party annual conference last week to address the resentment arising from economic blight that feeds right-wing populism. He blamed the “British Right” dating back to Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s for pushing deregulation, de-industrialization and privatization.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers his keynote speech on Day 3 of the Labour Party Conference on September 29, 2026, in Liverpool, England.

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

But if Burnham fails, Trump’s populist pal and Reform leader Nigel Farage is waiting to pounce.

Burnham sounds a little like former President Joe Biden, who tried to drain the well of Trumpism in decaying post-industrial areas with vast infrastructure and social spending bills.

But Biden long underestimated the size of the task. He said back in 2012 that he expected the “fever” of radical conservatism to break and later forecast a GOP “epiphany” after Trump left office in 2020.

Trump-style populism may wax and wane, but its resilience suggests it’s now a permanent feature in global democracies, whatever the political fates have in store for its patron.

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