Once the European elections, scheduled for June 6-9, are over, the 27 member states will turn their attention to another election, which in some respects is just as decisive for Europe’s future. On November 5, on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans will choose their next president. For the European Union (EU), this could mean the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
Trump’s first term left the EU 27 with some bad memories. Today, apart from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who on March 8 met his “good friend” Trump in his Mar-a-Lago mansion, and Italian Council President Giorgia Meloni, whose party, Fratelli d’Italia, maintains friendly relations with the Republican candidate’s team, no European leader is looking forward to him taking the helm once again.
But, in a way, the four years Europeans have spent working with Joe Biden have prepared them for this. It’s true that the Democratic president has warmed up a transatlantic relationship that his predecessor had damaged. True, he has stood by the Europeans and Kyiv since the start of the war in Ukraine. But, in essence, the Biden years have only affably confirmed Washington’s relative disinterest in Europe.
Trade disputes
This is most evident in the economic field. For example, when Biden announced the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August 2022, which provides massive subsidies for green technologies made in America, he was unconcerned that this new legislation could lead to relocations from Europe to the US. “The US has confessed to us that it has taken these measures without even imagining the consequences for the rest of the world,” said the Elysée Palace.
Biden had no more scruples when, in mid-May, he announced major tariff increases on products imported from China (electric vehicles, steel, aluminum, semiconductors, batteries, certain essential minerals and photovoltaic cells). However, “what China won’t sell to the US, it will dump on Europe. Biden has just started a trade war,” said a senior European official.
Even though Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, invested plenty in her personal relationship with the American president, she didn’t get much out of it. Washington has only marginally modified its IRA arrangements. As for the trade disputes that pre-existed Biden’s election – the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on aluminum and steel, the Airbus-Boeing dispute – they have been the subject of a truce between the two sides, but are still unresolved.
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