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Gnesotto, N. “Five lessons from America”, Blogpost, Jacques Delors Institute, November 2024

1. The first target of the regression that is devouring the world is women. In Iran, Afghanistan and all Muslim countries, they must be veiled and locked up. Onu-Femmes estimates that 89,000 women and girls were killed worldwide in 2022, the highest figure in the last twenty years. In the West, it’s not so much Islamism that wants to force them into submission as the revenge of the white male, with all his buddies the Hispanic, Afro-American, yellow or café au lait males, disoriented not only by the economic crisis but above all by four decades of feminism campaigning for gender equality. Let’s be wary. The women’s struggle is not a historical anecdote. It is history with a capital H, and European women are no smarter or more protected than American women.
2. How did we fall so far? It’s a question that should be on the lips of every Democrat in the world. For the event is less the election of Donald Trump than the overwhelming scale of his victory. What have we done, or neglected to do, over the last 50 years to allow hysteria to prevail over reason, insults to prevail over dialogue, violence to prevail over respect, the spirit of revenge to dominate and with it the pleasure of punishing, marginalising, denouncing and, at best, ignoring others? The American crisis goes far beyond the borders of the United States. It is the emerging peak of a major crisis in our Western democracies, the three components of which are shatte-ring together: liberalism and economic openness, representative democracy and the benevolence of American power.
3. But what is shaking the interior of American democracy is also shaking Western governance of the world. The global South detests our claims to embody the Good and our moral certainties. The populist people hate our rules, our self-righteousness, our culture and our principles. We try, often in good faith, to convince them of their error and to bring them back to mass support for democracy and its values. Unfortunately, they no longer believe in it. Excluded for too long, they want their revenge. Despised too much, they now want to dominate. The same movement is attacking the appalling Western superiority complex everywhere, in our democracies and in the rest of the world, the price of our internal and external arrogance.
4. Trump’s victory is a disaster for the European Union. Not just because of the trade wars he will unleash, particularly on the automotive industry. Not just because of the geopolitical risks that his unpredictability regarding NATO and his friendship with Vladimir Putin will increase. But because it will bolster populist resistance in Europe against the law, standards and rules – in short, against any external, in other words Brussels-based, obstacle to national sovereignty. Elon Musk and Victor Orban share the same hatred of government, regulation and checks and balances. In the name of freedom, they want to destroy the institutions that guarantee our freedom. All the European populists, starting with the RN in France, are the big winners of this election. Their traditional anti-Americanism has fizzled out.
5. Uniting and resisting is the only political response that Europe needs to devise and implement. But the immediate reflex will not be to divide, to run off to Mar el Lago to get the best photo with Trump, to stall, to turn a blind eye, to drink the chalice, to accept the unacceptable – Europeans know how to do all that. What’s more, the Commission has not even been appointed or endorsed by the Parliament, which is taking its time, as if it were the master of its own clocks. It is up to the Member States to provide the urgently needed European leadership: an extraordinary European Council is unlikely to be credible because Victor Orban’s presidency delegitimises this institution. So Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid and Warsaw must react together. What is the French President waiting for to invite the 5 great Europeans to dinner, so that together we can take up the American challenge?