Western Europe is an anti-Trump world. If there is a stable feature in the Western European politics, it is that: anti-Trumpism. For anyone who engaged in any political conversation on the topic in Europe since 2015, that much is clear. The ‘uncloseted’ pro-Trump individuals I personally came across in the UK since Trump’s appearance on the map of the world politics can still be counted in single digits.
This well-entrenched European anti-Trumpism is seen pretty much nowhere else in the world. In 2017, very early in Trump’s first presidency, YouGov conducted a global survey of attitudes toward Donald Trump asking how confident respondents felt about Trump being a good US president. In every single Western European country featured in Figure 1, a majority said that they were not at all confident. It seems like the Northern European block of countries was especially pessimistic in relation to Trump , with Denmark and Sweden leading in prevalence of this sentiment. Majority of British adults, nearly 7 in 10, did not expect Donald Trump to make a good US president. In that they are very similar to other Northern Europeans.
Outside of Western Europe, the situation was radically different. Populations of South East Asia were rather positive about Trump, and this attitude was found across Buddhist (Thailand), Christian (Philippines) as well as Muslim (Indonesia) lands. They obviously saw in DT something that the Europeans did not. A regrettable omission in that YouGov survey was Russia, though the results of the survey conducted by Levada Center around the time of the 2016 American election indicate that the majority of Russian preferred Trump over Clinton. It was, in short, a USA-Asia-Russia pro-Trump block against the European ‘anti-Trump’ block. In the absence of data, the alignment of the Middle East was left to our imagination.
Source: YouGov 2017 ‘Impact of Trump’ survey
Fast forward to the 2024 US election.
We now have new and much richer database. This time quite a few pollsters surveyed the globe in advance of the election, asking, simply, who did the respondents support, or preferred to see as an American president. A GlobeScan survey, sponsored by the Economist, found that the situation in 2024 was not very different from 2017. Still, as per Figure 2, Europe was in a remarkably anti-Trump mood, and so were some East Asian partners of the Western block (e.g. South Korea).
Source: GlobeScan survey sponsored by the Economist
Independent surveys conducted in places like the UK and Canada add some nuance to this: in these fundamentally anti-Trump countries, specifically, the only parts of the electorate where majorities support Trump are those located in the right to the far right corner of the political map. A YouGov survey in the UK, indicated, for example, that only 27% of the supporters of the Conservative Party would have preferred Trump if this was up to them (55% preferred KH), whereas among the supporters of Reform UK, a party to the right of the Conservatives, 57% preferred Trump and 25% KH. Among the British Labour electorate, incidentally, the levels of support for Trump were very low: the relationship of DT:KH is 8%:81%. So, in summary, a wide-spread taste for KH and a rejection of DT except the rightmost corner of British politics. In Canada, a recent Leger survey established that 45% of the supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada would have voted for Trump and 42% would have voted for KH. This makes the largest centre-right Canadian party a little more pro-Trump than its British sister. For the supporters of the People’s Party of Canada, to the right of the CPC, the proportions are 66% (DT) and 22% (KH), also a little more defined pro-Trump then Reform UK. The Liberal Party of Canada (an equivalent of the British Labour) is as anti-Trump as the British Labour party.
But look at South Asia and the Middle East! Several South and East Asian countries featured in Figure 2 were either equally divided with respect to KH and DT (e.g. Indonesia) or strongly preferred Trump (e.g. Vietnam). This time some Middle Eastern countries (Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) were surveyed too. And? They are in a pro-Trump mood, there is no other way of putting it. An independent survey conducted in Israel indicated that about 66% of Israelis supported Trump and 17% supported KH. This finding would have been characterised by many commentators across the political spectrum as ‘understandable’: Trump’s presidency is expected to be favourable to the Israeli interests. Well, that might be so. But (and?), the Israeli electorate with its marked preference for Trump is not a million miles away from the Turkish. Which invites a question: what makes the Israeli and Turkish electorates converge on Trump? Do they see in him the same, or different, promise? And does that matter?
To finish on a mysterious note: separately, VCIOM, the foremost Russian public opinion research centre, reported that, given the opportunity, 35%-40% of the Russian electorate would have opted for Trump and only 7% for KH. The remaining segment (55%-60%) either indicated that would not have voted or did not respond.
And so I repeat my question: what does the West not see in Donald Trump that the Rest does?