Populists Who Can Continue the Anti-Globalist Win Streak

Addressing a crowd at the Hay-Adams Hotel on Thursday night, former UKIP leader and lead Brexiter Nigel Farage put Donald Trump’s impending inauguration in the context of the wider revolt against globalism which is sweeping across the West.

“I would like to think, in my own little way, that what we did with Brexit was the beginning of what is going to turn out to be a global revolution, and that Trump’s victory is a part of that,” Farage said.

“I think through 2017 much of this revolution will continue across much of what is left of Mr. Juncker’s European Union.”

“I think what’s exciting is that 2016 will be looked at in ten years’ time, in a hundred years’ time, as a year of a great pivot, of a great change,” said Farage. “A year when nation-state democracy reasserted itself. A year when proper decent values reasserted themselves,” he added.

“And I think through 2017 much of this revolution will continue across much of what is left of Mr. Juncker’s European Union.”

The two European politicians best placed to follow in Trump’s footsteps are Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National (FN) party and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (PVV).

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Riding the anti-globalist wave, Le Pen has dragged the FN out of fringe obscurity and transformed it into a significant force in French politics. The continued negative consequences of globalization coupled with ani-E.U. feeling and the stresses of mass migration — not to mention numerous terrorist attacks on European soil — have fueled Le Pen and the FN’s popularity.

Le Pen currently leads the polls for the upcoming French presidential election in the spring. A poll released on Thursday and conducted by Ipsos Sopra Steria on behalf of Le Monde newspaper showed Le Pen with between 25 and 26 percent support in the first round of the presidential election.

The poll comes on the heels of an Ifop-Fiducial poll conducted in early January, which showed Le Pen in the lead with the support of 26.5 percent of voters. Le Pen seems eager to be seen as the French Trump — she recently traveled to Trump Tower in what many assumed was an attempt to meet with the business mogul.

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“He is putting in place measures I have been demanding for years,” Le Pen said of Trump earlier in the month. “I don’t mind explaining to French companies that they cannot escape tax that they should be paying in France, that they cannot go offshore without suffering the consequences … A choice has to be made, a choice of patriotism.”

In the Netherlands, Wilders’ PVV has largely been leading the polls for months now. Wilders’ popularity is founded on his opposition to the E.U. and mass Muslim migration into Europe.

According to an average of polls taken by Dutch public broadcaster NOS this week, Wilders’ party is on target to receive between 19.3 and 22 percent of the vote, which would work out to between 29 to 33 seats in Parliament.

While this is a slight drop from the between 20 and 25 percent average for PVV NOS calculated at the end of December, it’s still a significant lead over PVV’s nearest rival, the liberal VVD Party.

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Wilders too has sought to portray himself as his country’s Trump, a quest with which the mainstream media has been all too happy to assist. CNN has called him “Holland’s Donald Trump,” while German publication Deutsche Welle has called him the “Dutch Donald Trump.”

Days before the U.S. election, Wilders tweeted that “after the Dutch elections on March 15, 2017 I Will Make The Netherlands Great Again!” followed by the hashtag #MakeThe NetherlandsGreatAgain. He retweeted the same tweet days before Trump’s inauguration.

On the day of the inauguration itself, Wilders retweeted someone else’s tweet which displayed a Wilders version of a Trump trucker hat, also bearing the words “Make the Netherlands Great Again.”

America regained its national sovereignty, its identity, it reclaimed its own democracy,” Wilders said the day following Trump’s election win. “The lesson for Europeans is that look at America, what America can do we can do as well.” Le Pen and Wilders are trying their hardest to do so.