From MAGA to MEGA: Does Europe need its own direction?

Our own Jelena Postuma attended the From MAGA to MEGA conference in Brussels yesterday. This event was organised by Salon Liberté.

Speech by Jelena Postuma

I am very honoured to be able to speak today on this very important topic of the MAGA and MEGA movements, which in my opinion have the possibility to reshape the future of Europe, as well as the future of the US.

I think this is a good thing, because the problems the MAGA movement has addressed in the US and is trying to solve, are for a big part exactly the same as the issues we face in Europe. 

We’re talking about mass immigration, which causes not only a lot of pressure on our social services but also a lot of cultural conflicts. The native people of Europe do not recognize their cities anymore and feel unsafe in their own countries. Add to that the rising cost of living, caused by multiple factors such as inflation, high taxes and regulation, which has made it impossible for young people in many European cities to buy a house and start a family. Those regulations and high costs, especially energy costs, also push many companies in the manufacturing industry to move abroad, taking jobs away from us and further deteriorating the economy.

But I think the most dangerous issue we share, the issue which prevents all these problems from being addressed, let alone solved, is as Elon Musk calls it: the woke mind virus, or to put it in other terms: the prevalence of cultural Marxism. How does this prevent the current problems from being solved? Well, if you want to talk about the problems caused by mass migration, you’re a racist, if you ask questions about the excessive climate regulations and the high energy costs caused by the green transition, you’re a climate denier and if you’re worried about young kids mutilating their bodies because they are persuaded into thinking that will make them happy, you’re a transphobe.

And this way of thinking has stifled every fruitful debate in both Europe and the US for years. But the massive victory of the MAGA movement has finally broken this cultural and intellectual tyranny.

And this paves the way for them to address the problems they’re having and solve them. Within the first months, the Trump administration already increased the deportation of illegal immigrants, left the Paris Climate Agreement to decrease regulations and perhaps most importantly, has massively cut government spending through the Department Of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Today I checked how much taxpayer money they have saved until now, and it’s around 130 billion dollars!

And that’s a great achievement, which I think we should see as an example here in Europe. But to get to that point, we have to follow a different strategy. Because even though we face a lot of the same issues as the US, our situation is different. First of all, the US is a sovereign country, but we as Europeans are still chained to the bureaucratic behemoth that is the EU, which makes it impossible to unilaterally implement meaningful changes, such as securing our borders or ending climate spending. So in order to truly change our countries for the better, I believe it is necessary to admit that the European project has failed, and that we as Europe can be way more powerful and successful as sovereign countries, working together internationally, but not supranationally.

To make this a reality and move forward as sovereign countries will be quite a challenge, because of the way our governments work, and this brings me to the second difference between MAGA and MEGA. Because of the two party system in the US, the MAGA victory meant that they would automatically deliver the President and be in power. But in Europe, our governments work with coalitions, which means that even if a MEGA-minded party wins an election, this party can still be excluded from participating in the coalition, or even if it enters a coalition, become powerless because of all the compromises they have to make.

So what can we do then in Europe, to make MEGA a reality? In my view, we have to look beyond politics and start acknowledging the importance of culture. Because eventually, politics is downstream from culture. In the past, the left has been very successful in influencing the cultural attitude. Because when the right wing parties were focusing on economics and industry, the left-wing parties controlled the media, education and the arts, which largely influenced society. This has enabled them to completely control the narrative, up to the point where Christian, conservative parties fly the pride progress-flag and free market liberal parties promote more green regulations.

To transform this status quo on a political level, we have to first tackle it on a cultural level. In the Netherlands, this strategy is working, slowly but surely. Our party, Forum for Democracy, is the largest party in terms of members by far, and currently has its own talk show, its own farmers’ association, its own social network and hopefully within two years, our own school. This local and community-based strategy has made us very effective outside the political realm as well. For example, through social media we have exposed the insidious ways in which certain activist organisations are teaching 4 year-olds about sex, transitioning and gender in public schools. And because of our action, the majority of public schools are now cancelling these lessons. Very recently we also set up our own DOGE-department to expose government waste, together with our members. This enables our parliamentarians to make detailed proposals to cut spending and ease the tax burden on our citizens.

And I strongly believe that if we continue on this path of influencing people through culture, locally and through our own networks, we will eventually change the future of our countries, and Make Europe Great Again.