Ideal brothers are abandoning Trump one by one

Steve Benon may have been kicked out of the White House, but he's not giving up his extremist <x0...crease”. Former US President Donald Trump visited Central and Eastern Europe in May to call on Hungary and the Czech Republic to join the United States in defence of the Jewish-Christian culture.

Benon's message echoes rhetoric in a region that is turning into a beacon for radical right, thanks to its xenophobia resistance to immigration, and what he considers to be cultural “markism” The European Union. The movement towards the right in Central Europe is largely guided by political opportunism, which is perceived by the frustrations that were created 14 years after EU entry, when the quality of life is not yet equal to Western Europe.

But Benon is so unclear about the needs and priorities of Eastern European countries that even right-wing commentators in Budapest rushed to express their disappointment. Why, they asked, Benon repeat the motto of the White House, that China and Iran threaten Western civilisation, when these countries are actually a cornerstone of Viktor Orban's foreign and economic policy ambitions?

Hungary hopes to obtain a significant economic boost from Chinese investments in transport infrastructure, as part of the Beijing initiative “One Belt, a ground road” in the coming years, hopes to expand trade, and turn Budapest into a regional Chinese finance centre.

Benon composed some economic blasphemy in Prague. Trade is simply “unfair competition, using unpaid work in other countries”, he said. The surprising silence that plagued the audience was not due to its radical challenge to conventional wisdom, but because of about 80 per cent of the Czech Republic's GDP, it is due to exports.

Benon and Trump, may correctly have identified populist ideological incentives in the region, but they have failed to understand how economic realities, define political priorities for these small European countries.

Asked to identify the biggest enemies of last weekend, Trump called the EU an enemy “for the damage that has caused us in the field of trade”. But trade is the link that keeps Hungary, Poland and other Eastern European countries within the bloc -- the capital their governments gain from joining Brussels.

And Trump's threat to expand his trade struggle, setting tariffs on cars produced in the EU, puts the region's largest industry at risk. Slovakia is more fearful, with cars making up 60 percent of its exports to the United States.

At the head of vehicles produced by the Volkswagen companies, PSA Pejo Sitroen, Kia and Jaguar Land Rover on Slovak territory, the country is playing a major role in the chain of supply of numerous German brands being built throughout the region.

If Trump holds the issue of new tariffs, they will endanger some 40,000 jobs in Poland and 25,000 jobs in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Although populists in the region can enjoy the nationalist twist in Washington, this kind of threat cannot be ignored.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman who often compares with Trump, rarely escapes the opportunity to attack immigrants. But he is also well aware of the risks facing his country's economy. EU reform to remove the final barriers to free trade across the common market is a priority of its government, Babes said in an interview for “Freegn Police”, an hour before Benon spoke at an event in Prague.

Trump's trade attacks, and its withdrawal from Iran's nuclear agreement have caused concern that the leadership of the West by the US is coming to an end, the Czech prime minister warned. Unlike his Hungarian counterpart, Babis did not express any enthusiasm or interest in visiting the former US president.

His government is not prepared to sign long-term contracts with American companies to supply military helicopters, despite Washington's lobby to boost arms sales to European allies. The repeated Trump polls, that the European members of NATO, are failing to spend enough on defence, and the following questions it raises on the level of American military support, have alarmed the entire region.

Failure to guarantee that the United States once provided NATO countries is convincing former fans in Donald Trump region that the US and far-right cannot be the best new friends they had hoped for.

Returning to the US from his multi-debated 16 July meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the American president doubted whether his country would rush to defend an aggressive “ ” such as Montenegro, in implementation of NATO's Article 5.

With those few words, Trump broke down an alliance mechanism that more than any other organ draws Eastern Europe west. Tensions in capitals like Warsaw and Vilnius are obvious, and Trump is already rapidly turning from a hero, into a negative character for his ideological brothers.

Trump's election victory in 2016 fired hope first among Central European populists that their nonliberal revolt, which denounced the EU as an old negative structure, was shifting to a global scene. However, Benon's deaf rhetoric and disillusionment to Trump on the coalition's obligations only highlighted the contradictions that lie in the heart of this imagined “intensiveisation” of nationalists. /Foreign Police/Bota.al