Why Does the European Left Love Trump?

The Greeks offer a window into the reasoning.

I’ve written elsewhere that, just before the November 2024 presidential election I happened to be in Greece visiting relatives, and I was struck how, to a man, they were all so excited about the prospects of Donald Trump being elected president again. I say that I was struck because my Greek relatives have been socialists and communists for generations. Indeed, our ancestral island of Rhodes is known as a bastion of Eurosocialism. And a late cousin, Paraskos Parassos, was a longtime member of the politburo of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) representing the Dodecanese Islands. How, then, could lifelong leftists justify support for an American politician credibly accused in his own country of fascist or authoritarian tendencies? The answer is, actually, not terribly complicated.