From MAGA to "Euromaximalism": The New Right goes transatlantic

They’re young, constantly online and believe that their political movement can fill a lane that the mainstream center-right has long abandoned — anti-immigration and unabashedly patriotic politics communicated in an uninhibited fashion.

That’s not the post-2016 New Right that emerged in the United States in the course of Donald Trump’s first campaign for president. It’s a new pro-European, anti-immigration, young and terminally online hard right that’s fast emerging throughout Europe, and carries many of the same characteristics as their political cousins across the Atlantic.

Over the past few weeks I spoke to over a dozen members of this growing political movement from across Europe for a piece in Parliament Magazine. Their political movement is a spectacularly fast-growing phenomenon, spreading on social platforms and Discord servers in ways eerily reminiscent of America’s New Right.

I went to an event hosted by the Charlemagne Club in Brussels, and spoke with other groups sharing a similar vision across Europe, such as Ave Europa. They shared with me a vision of Europe rooted in a strong anti-immigration policy, a muscular federal European state with a strong European Army and a turn away from the naked nationalism that has long defined conservative, Euroskeptic politics in Europe.

If their thinking wins out in the battle for the future of Europe’s right, it would have big implications for Europe countries, but also the European Union. For decades resistance to European integration and the EU has been a calling card for hard right parties. The growth of right parties with a pro-EU stance could marginalize the Euroskeptics once and for all, strengthening the long-term viability of the EU.

What’s most fascinating about groups like Ave Europa, which hopes to form a new, European-wide conservative political party across the continent, is how closely what their offering lines up with market demand. Polling shows that more and more European voters are clamoring for the exact kind of pro-European, anti-immigration politics that these groups hold.

For example, a recent Eurobarometer survey conducted by the European Commission show that upwards of 85% of European citizens want the bloc to have a stronger international voice, and similar numbers are calling for a more unified Europe. Meanwhile, large majorities of Europeans are against immigration. The existing European parties to the right of the center-right christian democratic parties don’t meet this need. Parties like Alternative for Germany, National Rally and Law and Justice are anti-immigration, but are also much more Euroskeptic.

The new European New Right doesn’t see it that way. A scroll through their their social accounts on X or posts on Substack instead celebrates pan-European strength, usually with hotshot photos of what a European Army could look like, or calls for Euromaximalism, a kind of geographically expanded European Union that could assert more power on the world stage.

Perhaps it comes with youth, but conversations with these young conservative Europeans also revealed something else — a raw confidence in Europe’s possible place in the world that’s missing from most center-right or even right European politics today, and echoes the tenor, if not the content, of raw American First nationalism.

Ironically, many of those who have recently joined the movement, such as the Charlemagne Club’s Yaro Dali or Ave Europa’s Jovan Jovanovic shared with me that standing up to Trump’s aggressive rhetoric about Europe was a large part of what led them into the pro-European conservative fold in the first place.

That’s not so different from America’s New Right, which formed its own kind of online identity around a feeling of grievance. Of course, the root of the grievance is very different between the two. America’s New Right says the problem is progressive, woke globalist culture. Europe’s New Right says that European weakness — and in-part an over reliance on the U.S. — is to blame.

Where the movement will go from here is unclear. At the beginning of May, Ave Europa is hosting it’s first ever general meeting at a castle in the Black Forest, within eyesight of Strasbourg, where the European Parliament sits. It’s a site chosen for powerful symbolic purposes, suggestive of the conservative history and tradition that these leaders say has long defined Europe’s past.

The gathering may end up being a spark in the pan, a meeting of a few like-minded online savants that ends up fizzling out in the next few years as America continues to chip away at the EU. Or it could be a moment for the history books — the resurgence of a pro-European hard right that for decades has been largely left out of the European story.

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