The White House Is Noisily Mobilizing the World’s Far Right
Remember the Communist International? The Trump administration is trying to forge a “Popintern” — Populist International — with right-wing parties in democracies.
Populists of the world, unite!
Photographer: David Gannon/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s attention this week has been fixated on Donald Trump’s official visit to Britain, with castles and carriages and all the pageantry that delights a leader who views his own presidency as the apotheosis of reality TV. Less noticed, but just as telling, has been a simultaneous visit to Washington by Beatrix von Storch.
Beatrix who? You’re forgiven for asking. Von Storch is a far-right German parliamentarian and second-row leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). I met her in Berlin in 2013, when she and the then-newly founded AfD seemed zany but harmless — destined, as other far-right parties in postwar Germany had been, for petty infighting and eventual irrelevance.