US Vice President JD Vance has taken Europe by the lapels and pinned it against a wall this Friday. In a speech in Munich, he said: "If you go into elections afraid of your own voters, America can do nothing for you." Fear of your own voters means fear of speaking clearly about immigration, inclusion policies, feminism, the environment. The message is a political and intellectual challenge to the complacent two-party system that has governed the EU and that now claims, with a helplessness that is more hypocritical than sincere, that the hatred that grows on its right provides electoral benefits.
But one thing is to destroy the transatlantic link as we have understood it since 1945 and another is to come to Europe to give lessons. Whoever does not accept an electoral defeat and sends people to storm the Capitol cannot give any lessons in democracy. Those who speak of immigrants as criminals, those who pay a porn star to keep quiet, those who make the richest man in the world withdraw all aid to countries in need, those who expel officials because of their ideology, cannot teach any lesson in values. And those who use fear to stay in power by exciting the most irrational impulses of people should not teach others about their fears. On top of that, propaganda these days tries to present the presence and military spending of the United States in Europe as a generous and altruistic gesture, as if Washington had never profited from it.
The European Union has been accumulating problems and miseries that call for reforms and solutions. But they are certainly not those of Trump or his European far-right fans.
