Over the weekend, a conservative Polish historian named Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice opposition (and President Trump), narrowly won the Polish presidential election. For the European political establishment, Nawrocki’s victory was a catastrophe — a harbinger of right-wing fascism looming over the continent.
Why? Because Nawrocki campaigned against the mass immigration policy of Brussels while promoting conservative Catholic values and Polish nationalism. During his victory speech Sunday night, Nawrocki said, “My Poland is a Poland without illegal migrants. It is a Poland where, instead of integration centers, there are deportation centers for those who want to destroy our safety.”
It turns out, this sentiment is increasingly popular not just in Poland but all across Europe. Last week in Portugal, the right-wing populist Chega party overtook the center-left Socialist Party as the country’s main opposition. Six years ago, Chega had only a single seat in the Assembly of the Republic. It now has 60. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one of the most popular political parties in the country, yet Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has officially classified AfD a right-wing extremist group. Why? Because AfD opposes mass immigration and promotes German national identity. In France’s national elections last year, only a desperately cobbled-together coalition of left-wing parties prevented the right-wing National Rally (RN) and its allies from winning.
These populist movements are seen as a threat to the political class of Europe because they are concerned primarily with a proper historical understanding of what the nation is and what the state is for, which is the preservation of the nation and the defense of its people and heritage. Europe’s elites hate that, because their political project is explicitly post-national. They want to destroy the nation as such and replace it with supra-national institutions governed by a global elite.
The Trump administration has noticed this. Indeed one of the most important strategic foreign policy moves of the Trump administration has been the reorientation of America’s relationship with Europe in light of these new realities. The White House has made an accurate assessment that Europe’s political class no longer supports the Western tradition of natural law, individual rights, and national sovereignty. It’s a recognition, quite frankly, that European leaders have taken an authoritarian turn against their own people, calling into question the special relationship the United States has had with Europe since the American Founding.
Vice President J.D. Vance alluded to this back in February in his speech at the Munich Security Conference, calling out European governments for criminalizing free speech, jailing citizens for their opinions, and attempting to outlaw popular political parties. “You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” Vance said. “Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.”
The growing authoritarianism of European elites has since become a recurring theme in the Trump administration. A recent and much-discussed essay on the U.S. State Department’s Substack page by Samuel Samson placed this authoritarian drift into its proper historical context. After the devastation of World War Two, European powers sought to prevent future conflict by creating so-called “open societies” that would transcend nationalism and tradition in favor of a global liberalism that would in theory knit the continent, and indeed the world, closer together.
“Today, this promise lies in tatters,” writes Samson. “What endures instead is an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself. Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Chad Wolf, former acting Homeland Security director during Trump’s first term, reiterated this analysis in a speech last week at CPAC Hungary. European elites, he said, are increasingly “America brained,” a term that describes a “fixation on the leftist and globalist currents in American civics.” This fixation is what led to the decision by European leaders to allow in “floods of migrants with little to no cultural or civic compatibility to their host societies.” They are doing this as a result of ideas concocted by the American left, such as “the nation doesn’t really exist, is infinitely expansible, does not require generations of prior effort and inculcation, and moreover has no moral right to define itself.”
The natural consequence of this isn’t just mass immigration of unassimilated populations and all the attendant societal problems that brings, but also active persecution of the native population that dares to raise an objection to these policies — or any policy that runs counter to the reigning leftist ideology animating European elites.
And by persecution, I don’t mean cultural disapproval but the hard power of the state brought against its own citizens. Most Americans probably don’t realize that Britain arrests thousands of people every year for social media posts the government deems offensive. In 2023, British police arrested more than 12,000 people — a whopping 58 percent increase from 2019, according to government data.
By now, everyone in Britain knows that if you go online to criticize immigration or express disapproval of pro-Hamas demonstrations in Britain, you can expect a visit from the police. Amid anti-immigration protests and rioting last year in the wake of a mass stabbing that left three girls dead and others wounded, the British government warned its citizens to “think before you post.” The warning wasn’t against posting calls for violence, but against anything the government deemed offensive or inciting “hatred.”
Government crackdowns on free speech aren’t limited to immigration, of course — nor are they even limited to speech as such. Last year, for example, a British army veteran was convicted for praying silently outside an abortion clinic and ordered to pay a nearly $12,000 fine. In its ruling, the court found the man’s presence outside an abortion clinic amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because “at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped,” according to ADF International. This ran afoul of a new law criminalizing anything that might be construed as disapproval of abortion within a certain distance from abortion clinics.
It wasn’t an isolated case. In December 2022, a woman was arrested for doing the same in Birmingham. The charges were eventually dropped, but she was arrested again in March 2023. Those charges were also eventually dropped, but at a certain point it’s clear that the process in these cases is part of the punishment.
And it’s not just social media posts or silent prayer that can get British citizens in trouble with the law. A man who burned a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London to protest what he called the “Islamist government” of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now facing criminal prosecution. His conviction would mean the effective reintroduction of blasphemy laws to Britain, which were abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. It would also establish Islam as a special protected religious class and the Koran as a specially protected religious object, meaning that Britain would have a blasphemy law for Islam, but not other religions.
What this would amount to is a form of dhimmitude, an Islamic legal system governing non-Muslim people conquered by jihad wars and living in territories subject to Sharia or Islamic law. Convicting a man for burning the Koran in London would mean Britain itself has capitulated to the demands of its unassimilated Muslim minority, and has established a de facto system of dhimmitude against its own native British population.
This heavy-handedness from European governments is what Vance was talking about in his Munich Security Conference speech when he said that such policies look “more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way — or even worse, win an election.”
If Nawrocki’s victory in Poland is any indication, populists in Europe are eventually going to start winning elections. When that happens, we should be prepared for European elites to react in the worst possible way, cracking down on duly elected political leaders while invoking “democracy” to justify their tyranny. The Trump administration, for its part, should be prepared to respond to this impending conflict — and come down on the side of the European people against their corrupt elites.