While Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán probably woke up on November 6, the day after the US presidential election, ready to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate Donald Trump’s re-election, it’s no secret that many other European leaders were not in the same mood.
However, it would be too simplistic to assume that the way Europe thinks about the transatlantic partnership can be divided into those who are celebrating the victory of Trump and the Republican Party, which flipped the Senate and defended its majority in the House of Representatives, and those who are not. Considering how the transatlantic partnership is viewed by the public in different European countries, there are many shades of gray.
Germany is situated at the darker gray end of this color spectrum. The results of the Körber-Stiftung’s annual public opinion survey, The Berlin Pulse, have shown since 2017 that whoever sits in the White House has a tremendous impact on how Germans assess the state of their country’s bilateral relations with the United States. In September 2020, at the end of Donald Trump’s first term, only 18 percent of Germans rated the relationship as good. After President Joe Biden’s first eight months in office, 71 percent shared this view.
When asked directly in November 2024, about the likely impact of Donald Trump’s second term on US-German relations, 79 percent of Germans said it would be negative. Germans seem to remember that during Trump’s first term their country was labelled the United States’ “worst ally” by the American nationalist right.
Different Views Across Europe
The Washington-based think tank, Pew Research Center, has been tracking global views of the United States and confidence in the US president for the past 20 years. Their findings display the color spectrum of European perceptions of the United States and show that the issue of personnel is something that doesn’t just matter to Germans.
The Pew survey includes 10 European countries, nine European Union member states and the United Kingdom. Among the European countries surveyed, favorable views of the United States declined with the presidency of Donald Trump in 2017 and improved with the election of Joe Biden in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In Greece, Hungary, and Poland, favorable views of the United States increased at least slightly during Trump’s first term. So did confidence that Donald Trump will “do the right thing” in world affairs. In Poland, in particular, he managed to win the hearts and minds of the public during his term in office.
Based on these findings from the first Trump term, when public opinion across Europe was diverse and dynamic, it will be difficult to speak to the United States during his second term with a single European voice. A bilateralization of relations with each European country trying to get the best deal with the “dealmaker-in-chief” may be a more likely scenario, especially given the current leadership vacuums in Germany and France. The fact that Trump’s first trip after his election was to Paris is an early sign that there is no European Union strategy for team play in place, and that the new European Commission will have a hard time fostering unity among the 27 EU members states.
Not Only Personnel, but Also Policies
The findings also show that it is not only personnel that matters, but also the policies. What all the nine EU member states and the UK have in common in the Pew survey is that, although favorable views of the United States took a big jump with the election of Biden in 2020 in all of them except Hungary, this favorable view had deteriorated toward the end of his term in 2024.
The findings of The Berlin Pulse support the hypothesis that Germans had high expectations of Biden in some policy areas and were disappointed. One example is climate and environmental policy. After Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office in 2021, 41 percent of Germans saw the United States as a partner on this issue (up from 12 percent in 2020). Three years later, only 26 percent shared this view. An indicator that the Biden administration did not deliver much in the eyes of the public, apart from the big multilateral gesture at the beginning. In the case of Donald Trump, this may be to his advantage as he does not need (or want) to live up to high expectations—on the contrary.
History May Not Repeat Itself
However, the latest findings of The Berlin Pulse survey from November suggest that the first Trump presidency should not be used as a blueprint for the second. Before and shortly after the US elections, almost half of the German public named the United States as their country’s most important partner—despite expectations that bilateral relations would suffer under Trump. This is a dramatic change from his first presidency, when only one in 10 Germans shared this view. This may be an indicator of what could be a Europe-wide trend: Trump-skeptical Europeans no longer link the relevance of the United States to their sympathy for the reelected president.
This suggests that the public has a realistic view of the situation in which Europeans find themselves. It would be illusory to neglect the relevance of the United States, especially given the alternatives on the table. As The Berlin Pulse survey shows, 71 percent of Germans were in favor of strengthening partnerships in Asia, Africa, and Latin America after the US elections. The fact that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reached a political agreement for the EU-MERCOSUR free trade agreement in Montevideo in early December—after almost 25 years of negotiations—sends an important message to European capitals. Whatever their perceptions of the transatlantic partnership, the days of counting on a big brother are over. It is time to enlarge the family!
Julia Ganter is program director of the Körber Emerging Middle Powers Initiative and editor of The Berlin Pulse at Körber Stiftung.
