Trump, an earthquake for Europe

'I don't see how it could get any worse': the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and former President of the EU Commission. Coming from a man who used to talk to Donald Trump at the time of his first term in office and violent Euro-American altercations, this is to be believed.

Yet this time the earthquake for Europe could prove more devastating. First of all because Trump redivivus wants to be a breakthrough president more than ever, but with stronger and more articulate convictions, a clear project, and the means and men to realise it. Thanks to a clear electoral victory that also gave him control of Congress and the Supreme Court, the ganglia of federal power.

And then America First, the doctrine of protectionism and unilateralism now entrusted to a handful of loyal 'hawks', chosen more for loyalty than competence, in strategic posts in the Administration to carry out the boss's directives.

The end of bipartisan political culture, therefore, and perhaps also of the principle of checks and balances, of the division of powers, which has always been a strong point of US democracy. Four years later, however, Europe appears weaker than ever. The Ukrainian border war, Putin's imperialism hungry for territorial revenge even in Georgia and Moldova, the end of Biden's pro-Atlantic America and the encore of Trump's introverted, isolationist and anti-NATO America. Staggering governments in France and Germany, at the mercy of right-wing and left-wing extremism. Common institutions, Commission and Europarliament, paralysed by the erosion of the old centrist balances shaken by the advance of right-wingers more or less everywhere. In short, a divided Europe, politically at risk of acephaly in Brussels, in the face of the incoming cyclone.

An economy in loss of competitiveness and per capita wealth, tested by the halt to low-cost Russian oil, by Chinese double-dealing, by the caducous certainties about the American shield in NATO. From the German crisis and that of its entire industry cut up by EU over-regulation and the ideological lurch of the Green Deal. On the march towards greener, digital, high-tech and military development, for now without the necessary mega-investments. Unless he decides to act, and soon, to this Europe of high taxation, excessive regulations and suffocating bureaucracy, energy prices that are five times those of the USA, to this Europe that after Covid and the Ukrainian war has increased its pharmaceutical, energy, technological, financial and military dependence on the USA, Trump's arrival risks giving the final blow. Or, on the contrary, the unexpected blow.