Make Europe Great Again? Transnational Engagement of European Party Leaders with the Trump Administration on Facebook

The far right has become a global phenomenon, with the transnational coordination of far-right movements posing significant challenges to liberal democracies. Yet, we lack systematic evidence on how these networks form and consolidate across borders. While formal cooperation between far-right politicians in Europe, for instance in the European Parliament, has existed for more than a decade, more recent developments suggest a growing transatlantic alignment of the far right. This development is illustrated by transnational events such as the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon), which bring together far-right actors from a wide range of countries. Moreover, with Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 and the positioning toward the Trump administration becoming a central foreign policy issue, understanding the mechanisms of far-right transnationalization has become increasingly urgent. In this paper, we analyze the engagement of EU far-right leaders with Trump-adjacent content on social media, and whether this engagement intensified with the advent of the second Trump administration. Addressing this question is crucial, as the “Americanization” may serve as ideological glue fostering the transnationalization of the European far-right. We approach this problem by examining the Facebook communication of all party leaders in the EU over two years surrounding the 2024 U.S. presidential election (November 5, 2023 to November 5, 2025). Our research design assesses to what extent these leaders mention key figures associated with the Trump administration and its ideological keywords (e.g., MAGA, [country] First, woke), and to what extent politicians from different countries engage with the same content. We leverage bipartite network analysis to parse the connections between American and European politicians (nodes A) and issues (nodes B) over time. This method allows us to map both individual engagement patterns and cross-border coordination around specific Trump-adjacent content. We expect to find an intensification of Trump-adjacent content following the 2024 election, coinciding with an increase in transnational links via the United States. These findings would have broader implications for understanding the pathways of European far-right transnationalization, as well as the far right’s ongoing radicalization.