Is America Contagious? 

Donald Trump meeting with Hungary’s Viktor OrbánMother Jones illustration; Mark Wilson/Getty

In late September, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced a crackdown on a relatively new foe: antifa, which he said would be designated as a “terrorist organization^[2].” This was, on its face, ridiculous, given that antifa is an ideology, not an organization, and not one that Orbán has previously spent much time denouncing. But the move served not only to make headlines, but to link the Hungarian autocrat even more closely to his mutual admirer Donald Trump, who’d announced the same enforcement action against antifa the previous week.

The whole incident is, on the one hand, nothing new—two strongmen engaging in a bit of near-tandem posturing and peacocking—and on the other, is part of an emerging pattern. Extremists around the world have picked up the message that America’s new hard right turn is to be emulated: the call to ban “antifa” was also quickly echoed by far-right parties in Belgium and Austria^[3], and the new American emphasis on brutal mass deportations has inspired those same parties across Europe^[4] and elsewhere. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform Party is adopting policy positions one after another from MAGA, in what one columnist referred to as a “copy and paste^[5]” of Trump’s policies; Farage himself is a friend of Trump as well as a frequent visitor to both the U.S. and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Not to be outdone, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch recently vowed to create a “removals” force, modeled, she said, “on U.S. ICE^[6]” that would deport 150,000 people a year.

Ultra-nationalist leaders now flock to Washington to confer with—and seek the favor of—Donald Trump, recently including Beatrix Von Storch, a top official in Germany’s ultra-nationalist AfD party, who made a^[7] “surprise visit” in September to the White House along with Joachim Paul, another party official. In February, AfD called for a European Union version of DOGE^[8] to reduce bureaucracy and clear the way for restrictive immigration reforms. Around the globe, MAGA hats are common sights at far-right populist events; the New York Times recently reported on a new symbol adopted by the Brazilian far-right: the American flag^[9].

Global far-right populist movements are nothing new, and America didn’t create AfD or similar parties elsewhere. Experts who study what is known as political contagion track how extremist policies spread from country to country; now, with the United States in democratic freefall, these experts are concerned that other countries may start dismantling themselves too, stripping the same guardrails and basic freedoms that the U.S. is so speedily taking apart. Given America’s outsized global political and cultural influence, the effects could be seismic, accelerating an already-disturbing trend around the world. 

“I’m very concerned,” says Stefanie Walter, a professor of international relations and political economy at the University of Zurich who has studied the spread of populist ideas, and who warns that changes in the information landscape makes their diffusion more likely.

Her research on whether the UK’s Brexit referendum would^[10] inspire similar movements elsewhere in Europe demonstrated that support outside the UK was closely tied to perceptions of the project’s success; it polled its highest in mainland Europe on the day in 2016 that Brexit-supporters won the referendum. But as the downsides of departing the EU suffused news coverage of the drawn out exit negotiations, opinion on the continent soured.

“People are actually quite good at looking at other countries and drawing conclusions about what that means for their own countries,” she says. As it became clear that Brexit would threaten the British economy^[11], “that really opened people’s eyes,” Walter says, “‘that, ‘Wow there’s quite something at stake.’” 

But with increased reliance on social media, Walter explains, today “the political information that some groups get is very different,” she says. “If you’re in the populist nationalist algorithm bubble, then you probably hear all the time about how it’s so great what Donald Trump is doing and the migration problem is being solved and jobs are flowing back to the U.S.” Those echo chambers, Walter warns, could mean that even policies that prove disastrous for ordinary people may spread further and faster than ever.  

That far-right populists and would-be authoritarians influence each other is well-known. (They sometimes even seem to mimic each other physically; see Argentina’s Javier Milei or the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who both share improbably-hued, gravity-defying hairstyles with Trump.) But political contagion scholars look at how ideas are translated into policy, enacted, and then spread across borders. According to academics who have looked at the issue, far-right populist ideas spread especially quickly. 

Daiki Kishishita and Atsushi Yamagishi are both researchers in economics at Japan’s Hitotsubashi University. In a 2021 paper, they created a model to show how populist extremism^[12] is “contagious across countries” thanks to “dynamic interaction between…changing public opinion and implemented policies.”

In other words, Kishishita explains, “Suppose a leader in Country A adopts an extreme policy to win populist support. People in Country B see this, but they can’t tell whether the leader did it just to gain votes or because that extreme policy actually makes sense for Country A.”

But just by becoming policy elsewhere, Kishishita adds, voters in Country B start to believe that the same kind of extreme policy might also be good for them: “This shift in public opinion then pushes leaders in Country B to adopt similar extreme policies.” 

Kishishita and Yamagishi theorize that extreme populist politics are especially contagious because they attract more cross-border media attention and publicity. “For any political movement to spread across borders, it has to be visible to people in other countries,” Kishishita wrote. “If populist extremism tends to draw more international attention than other types of political movements, then it’s likely to spread more easily.” 

Kishishita and Yamagishi’s research suggests that the global spread of far-right populist policies is helped along by what they call “distrust shock,” which takes place, Kishishita told me, “when people suddenly lose trust in their politicians—for example, because of corruption scandals.” When that happens in one country, he adds, “politicians there feel pressure to prove that they are not part of the corrupt elite. One way to do that is to adopt extreme policies that corrupt elites would never support.” That country’s moves toward populist extremism are witnessed worldwide, meaning, the authors write, that “political distrust shock only in one country can induce populist extremism in subsequent countries.” 

Kishishita and Yamagishi have also looked at how the transmission of populist extremism can be stopped. “The chain can break if some leaders act more like ‘statesmen’ rather than short-term vote seekers,” Kishishita says. “These leaders focus on what’s truly best for their citizens, rather than copying extreme policies to chase popularity. If voters see, over time, that politicians reject extreme policies, they begin to realize that the extreme policies do not serve their interests and move away from populist extremism. That’s how the cycle can eventually stop.”

The scholars I spoke to agree that the spread of far-right populism is, to some degree, organic, as such ideas pick up genuine popular support across countries. But it is also highly coordinated, with clear and deliberate cooperation among self-described anti-globalist groups who are working together to create an increasingly illiberal world. There are now versions^[13] of America’s annual CPAC gathering in Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, Poland, and South Korea—an irony, considering that far-right movements often position themselves as anti-globalist and concerned only with their countries’ own self-interest. (The effects can be unintentionally hilarious: CPAC Hungary, for instance, proclaimed itself to be “the epicenter of the global fight against globalism.”)  

“The contagion effect is important and real,” says Walter, the professor at University of Zurich. “But I think a lot works via elites. Currently what I’m most concerned about, actually, is the coalescing of the elites and the support for each other—especially the tech elites, who are so influential and control the information environment and a lot of money.”    

To track that, Walter is paying special attention to the ways far-right politicians echo American talking points, and if they expand on those imitations—for instance, if they begin using Christian references, which would be unusual in European politics, or if they wage rhetorical war on the administrative state in the way that DOGE and the Trump administration have. “Are they pushing similar policies to Trump? And what kind of rhetoric are they using?” she asks.

Stefania Kapronczay has observed coordination between far-right political parties, especially within Europe; she’s a human rights defender affiliated with Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute who spent over a decade co-leading the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. She points to a laundry list of ways that Hungary has tried to support and prop up other would-be autocrats in “a coordinated and organized way.”  

“Orbán supported Janez Janša’s campaign in Slovenia by financing key media outlets^[14] and shaping online election campaigns^[15] across the region,” Kapronczay begins; in North Macedonia, she adds, “Hungarian media investors linked to Fidesz,” Orbán’s party, “bought outlets to back nationalist parties.” Serbia and Hungary’s leaders “maintain a mutually supportive relationship, including cooperation in media and political messaging.” And in Croatia, she says, “Fidesz-linked networks have sought to amplify sympathetic voices through think tanks and cultural institutions.” 

“I would say it’s funny if it’s not so serious,” Kapronczay adds, highlighting the irony of Hungary’s influence campaigns in the face of its regime’s hostility^[16] to Hungarian organizations that get foreign financial support. “At the same time they are going after everyone who receives foreign funding, claiming that foreign funding equals being against Hungary’s interest, they’re doing the same.”

The lesson, Kapronczay thinks, is that journalists and “pro-democracy actors” as she puts it, “could and should learn from each other” in other countries, as extremists are doing worldwide. 

“There are a lot of tactics that are useful and successful against this kind of politics, [ones that] promote human rights and democratic principles,” she says. “We can really learn from each other.” She points, for instance, to how Poland “defeated an authoritarian government,” with voters replacing the Law and Justice party in 2023^[17] after eight years of increasingly iron-fisted rule.

“These aren’t policies that are just destined to win all the time. We have to be involved, and we have to learn,” Kaprocnzay says. “This is the silver lining,”