Maga-styled parties given bloody nose in round of European elections
When The Telegraph sat down with Romania's far-Right candidate for the presidential elections, he proudly proclaimed that 'the wave of the Maga movement is here in Europe'.
But on Monday morning, George Simion was licking his wounds after suffering defeat to a pro-EU centrist, with similar election results also filtering in from Portugal and Poland.
On Sunday, three EU member states held crucial elections seen as a test for the political centre, with pro-Donald Trump, Right-wing candidates hoping to import his cut-throat style to the continent.
But the tactic hasn't worked.
In Romania, self-styled Maga (Make America Great Again) firebrand Mr Simion hoped to beat Nicușor Dan, the liberal pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, in the second round of the presidential elections.
The vote was a rerun of the November presidential elections, which were annulled due to suspicions that Russia had influenced them in favour of pro-Putin candidate Călin Georgescu.
In Poland, right-wing party Law and Justice [PiS], which was exceedingly close to Mr Trump during his first term in office, jostled for power with Civic Platform, Donald Tusk's ruling centrist party, for the role of president. And in Portugal, the hard-Right, anti-corruption Chega party was up against the Socialists and Democratic Alliance, the centre-Right ruling party.
To the relief of EU leaders, and to the disappointment of the Trump camp, all three centrist candidates swept to victory in their respective polls - albeit by an extremely narrow margin in the case of Poland, where a run-off will be held.
Mr Trump has long sought to boost the profile of far-Right, anti-EU populist movements in Europe, as he considers them natural political bedfellows. Like him, they feel that the centrist rulers of Europe are grossly complacent on hot-button issues such as mass-migration. Some share his more sympathetic view towards Vladimir Putin and Russia.
The US president has also tried unsuccessfully to shift the odds in his favour in Greenland – where the centrist Democrats won by a landslide, apparently thanks to voters who oppose Mr Trump's desire to take over the territory.
Likewise in Canada, the Trump administration-backed Conservative Party was trounced by Mark Carney – the anti-Trump liberal poster boy, and former governor of the Bank of England,.
It is also no secret that Europe's current crop of centrist leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron, loathe populism: they view it as a con which offers, but cannot deliver, fast and easy solutions to complex problems.
They will no doubt feel emboldened by this set of results, which counters the White House narrative that European countries are embracing Trumpian populism one by one.
In future dealings with Mr Trump, they can bring up this set of results in response to suggestions that the centrists don't really have the democratic backing of the people.
Some of Mr Trump's closest allies, including Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, aggressively campaigned on behalf of the far-Right populist Alternative for Germany [AfD] party during February's federal elections.
The Trump administration's support was so brazen that JD Vance, the vice-president, snubbed a meeting with Olaf Scholz, the then chancellor, at the Munich Security Conference and instead paid a visit to Alice Weidel, the AfD leader.
The gambit did not pay off, with Friedrich Merz's centre-Right Christian Democrats [CDU] instead emerging as the victor. Nor did it yield results on Sunday in the cases of Romania, Poland and Portugal.
On Monday, it was Mr Merz's turn to send congratulations: 'Romania affirmed its commitment to a strong and secure Europe: Dear [Mr Dan] congratulations on your election victory!' he wrote in a Romanian language post on X.
While the champagne corks might have been popping in Brussels on Monday, these results also carried a warning to the centrists: in Portugal, the far-Right Chega party secured its best-ever result with 22 per cent of the vote. It is likely to become the second largest party in parliament.
That result mirrors the success of the AfD, now the de-facto opposition in the Bundestag, the German parliament, having won 20 per cent of the vote in February.
Chega's success appears to be mainly drawn from railing against corruption, with leader André Ventura vowing to clean up Portuguese politics.
Ironically, the party has had to expel or discipline members for being caught up in precisely the kind of sleaze scandals it opposes. One MP has already been kicked out of the party for stealing suitcases at airports, another member has been caught drink-driving, and a third has been charged with paying for oral sex from an underage teenager.
None of this seems to have turned off pro-populist voters in Portugal, which is perhaps no surprise: Mr Trump himself has weathered countless sleaze scandals over the past nine years.
In Poland, the results paint a much more mixed picture, even if the centrist candidate came in first place, as neither party won an outright majority.
That means a run-off will be held in Poland on June 1, allowing Karol Nawrocki, the Right-wing PiS candidate, a chance at overtaking Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist who is backed by Donald Tusk, the prime minister.
'Nawrocki's victory would undermine Tusk's political project and could be the harbinger of PiS' return to power in 2027 or even earlier in case of a snap election,' said Piotr Buras, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 'In the medium term, disintegration of Tusk's coalition could be one of the consequences.'
He added: 'The campaign in the next two weeks will be very polarizing and brutal, a confrontation of two visions of Poland: pro-EU, liberal and progressive versus nationalist, Trumpist and conservative.'
Back in Bucharest, however, Mr Simion does not seem too brutally disappointed by the results – and seems to view them as a temporary setback.
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