The Anti-Trans International Lost Its Capital
Notes on a fracture nobody planned
Saturday morning, May 9, 2026. In Budapest, a former Fidesz insider, Péter Magyar, took the oath of office and became Hungary’s first post-Orbán prime minister in 16 years. Two days later, in Brussels, the twenty-seven foreign ministers of the European Union voted unanimously to sanction Israeli settler organizations, doing what Viktor Orbán had personally blocked for almost two years and what President Trump had explicitly undone on his first day in office. Two days before all that, in England, Wales, and Scotland, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gained 1,244 council seats and took fourteen English councils. The latest YouGov Westminster poll, fielded May 10-11, put Reform on 28 percent, eleven points ahead of every other party.
Three stories. One week. One continent and one ocean.
Most take these events as a single mood. Populism is winning. The right is rising. Fasten your seatbelts. I’m here to argue the opposite. Read together, these three stories show that the trans-Atlantic populist alliance Donald Trump and JD Vance have been trying to anchor is actively coming apart. Not collapsing. Fracturing. Splitting along fault lines that were always there.
I’m writing from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is the wrong place to be a transgender woman in 2026 and the right place to watch the global authoritarian turn happen in real time. South Dakota was the sixth state to ban gender-affirming care for minors. I have to leave my own state for routine medical care. I’m not coming to this story from the cheap seats. I’m watching the people who want to delete me from public life try to build an international coalition, and I’m watching that coalition trip over its own contradictions.
The thesis: the Magyar government, the EU settler sanctions, and the Reform surge are not three data points on the same trend line. Three different trend lines are running through the same week. The Vance-aligned populist lost in Hungary. The Vance administration’s most reliable European blocker on Israel policy is gone. The British populist who once campaigned with Trump is now Britain’s most popular politician precisely since he has begun to put distance between himself and the White House. Each development would complicate the story of a unified right-wing international in its own way. Together, they break it.
What they do not break, and this is the part American liberals keep getting wrong, is the underlying social conservatism of the European electorate.
I. Hungary
On April 7, 2026, five days before the Hungarian election, US Vice President JD Vance stood on a stage in Budapest next to Viktor Orbán and decided to talk about my body. “Across the left, there is a band of radicals,” Vance told the rally crowd. “They reject mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood in the name of liberation. They condemn children to mutilization and sterilization in the name of gender care.” The trans journalist Erin Reed called it the most aggressive anti-trans rhetoric ever delivered by a sitting US official on foreign soil. Trump endorsed Orbán on Truth Social, promising “the full Economic Might of the United States.”
Orbán lost anyway. Tisza won 141 seats out of 199. Turnout was nearly 80 percent. The OSCE noted that there was “no level playing field,” meaning Orbán cheated in every legal way available to him and still lost by 20 points.
Hungary spent five years building one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ+ legal regimes in Europe. In 2020, Orbán’s government banned legal gender recognition for trans people. In 2021, parliament passed the so-called child protection law. In March 2025, parliament criminalized Pride marches. In April 2025, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law constitutionally enshrined the Pride ban and declared that Hungarian law recognizes only two sexes. That architecture was built by people who treated American conservatives as students. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, asked about the inspiration for Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, said the quiet part out loud: “We were watching the Hungarians.”
Here is where the story gets harder. Magyar’s Tisza party did not campaign on rolling back that architecture. The Hungarian LGBTQ rights organization Háttér Society stated flatly that “the party’s election program does not address LGBTQ+ issues.” Magyar refused to attend the 2025 Budapest Pride. He declined to denounce the Pride ban by name. The day after Magyar was sworn in, the European Council on Foreign Relations published a post-election poll. 71% of Tisza voters supported the new government that protects LGBTQ+ rights. Magyar himself has not promised to protect them.
This is the contradiction. Magyar has a two-thirds supermajority, the same constitutional weapon Orbán used to entrench his regime. He has the legal capacity to repeal the trans recognition ban, restore Pride rights, and reverse the Fifteenth Amendment. As of the day his government was sworn in, he has committed to none of those things. Nine days before the swearing-in, the CJEU ruled in Commission v Hungary that Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBT law violated Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The ruling sits on Magyar’s desk. He could comply. He could comply partially. He could let Háttér’s pending Strasbourg cases work their way through the system and do nothing himself. The next year will tell us which Magyar we got.
What the Hungarian election did, unambiguously, was break the Vance-Orbán axis. The American right has lost its European model.
II. Brussels
Hungary, under Orbán, had spent two years as the EU’s sole holdout on sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The bloc operates by unanimity on foreign policy, meaning that one government can block twenty-six others. Orbán used that veto for Benjamin Netanyahu, his closest non-American ally.
Two days after Magyar was sworn in, that veto was gone. Twenty-seven foreign ministers adopted, unanimously, sanctions targeting “extremist and violent” Israeli settler organizations and their leaders. The list includes the settler organizations Amana, Nachala, Hashomer Yosh, and Regavim, as well as leaders Daniella Weiss, Meir Deutsch, and Avichai Suissa. Weiss called the sanctions “ridiculous.” Netanyahu, posting from his official account, said the European Union “exposed its moral bankruptcy.”
The most important sentence in the news coverage came from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas: “Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups, and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.” The European Union is now sanctioning the same individuals that the previous American administration sanctioned and that the current American administration unsanctioned. The trans-Atlantic alliance that for two generations meant Washington led and Brussels followed is now running in reverse.
That speed is the tell. The sanctions had been ready for months. They were waiting for Hungary. The unanimous vote includes Italy under Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has historically been one of Israel’s most reliable European partners. It includes Germany under Friedrich Merz, whose CDU/CSU government has historically treated criticism of Israel as politically untouchable. It includes France under Emmanuel Macron, whose foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said: “It’s done.”
This is what a fracture looks like. The European populist right is not unified on Israel. Meloni and the German CDU support Israel. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez wants to suspend the EU’s trade agreement with Israel entirely. Reform UK is unambiguously pro-Israel. The AfD is openly hostile to Israeli policy and to Trump’s Iran war. Magyar is in the process of resolving Hungary’s question the other way from Orbán. His party platform commits Hungary to joining the eurozone by 2030. His first major foreign policy action as prime minister was to drop the veto Orbán had been holding on to on Netanyahu, which is to say, the veto Orbán had been holding on to on Trump. He did it two days into the job.
III. Britain
If the trans-Atlantic populist alliance was simply losing, Reform UK should be losing too. On May 7, Nigel Farage’s party gained 1,244 council seats and took fourteen English councils, including Essex, the home turf of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. It became the joint-second largest party in the Scottish Parliament and the second largest in the Senedd in Wales. Welsh Labour was reduced to nine seats, the worst result in its history. The YouGov voting intention poll put Reform on 28 percent, eleven points ahead of every other party.
The British populist right is in a position it has not held since the founding of the modern party system in 1922. Reform’s surge has happened in inverse proportion to Farage’s public association with Trump. The Conversation’s analysis put it bluntly: “For UK voters, Trump is the 19th most popular foreign politician, in between the King of Denmark and Benjamin Netanyahu.” Farage has gone from being photographed with Trump at the golden elevator in Trump Tower to running local election campaigns in which Trump’s name barely features.
The pivot point was Ukraine. In February 2025, when Vance dismissed any European peacekeeping force in Ukraine as “20,000 troops from some random country,” Farage publicly broke with him. “JD Vance is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Farage said. The American vice president had insulted the British military, and the British populist who had spent a decade in Trump’s orbit decided, in that moment, that he was a British politician first.
The pattern repeated during Trump’s war with Iran. Italian Prime Minister Meloni refused to let the United States use the air base in Sicily for strikes on Iran. Spain refused to allow US forces to use its bases. Le Pen described Trump’s war goals as “erratic.” Foreign Policy’s March analysis was blunt: “Trump’s Iran War Destroys MAGA’s Alliance With Europe’s Far Right Populists.”
What Reform shares with Trumpism is a willingness to use the state to police identity. Reform’s policy outputs have been hostile to legal gender recognition, hostile to trans inclusion in sports and bathrooms, and aligned with the UK’s drift toward the Cass Review framework that has functionally ended gender-affirming care for young people in England. A Reform government in 2029 would not need to import Hungarian policy. It would be applying the templates the current Labour government has already been building. The populist who is putting distance between himself and Trump is not making British politics less hostile to people like me. He is making it more hostile, on his own terms.
The Reform surge complicates the thesis. It does not refute it. If the alliance was holding, Farage would be on Truth Social every week defending Vance’s anti-trans speeches in Budapest. He is in Romford explaining that British politics is now about “patriotic ideas.” That is the rhetoric of someone who has noticed that being seen as Trump’s man is a net negative with British voters by roughly 30 points.
The European populist right is not collapsing. It is nationalizing. Each country’s populism is becoming more recognizably its own, and less recognizably part of a shared trans-Atlantic project.
What it adds up to
Five fault lines run through these three events.
Russia. The European populist right was held together in 2017-2024 by a shared willingness to soft-pedal Putin. The Russian invasion of Ukraine fractured that consensus. The Vance-Trump position is now a minority position even inside the European right.
Israel. The European populist right is not unified on Israel and never really was. With the Hungarian veto gone, the European center had the votes to refuse, and on May 11, it did.
LGBTQ+ rights as bedrock identity versus disposable rhetoric. Orbán built his regime on anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. The Trump-Vance Republican Party has done the same. The rest of the European right has not. The gap is widening.
Trump has personal liability. Vance flew to Budapest, made the strongest pitch he could make, and Orbán lost by twenty points. Within a week, Politico Europe was reporting Le Pen’s “keep our distance” instruction to her party. Mark Carney, Anthony Albanese, and Nicușor Dan all won recent elections in part by running explicitly against Trump.
Tariffs. The Trump tariffs hit European economies, including those run by populist right governments, who had expected better treatment. The Trump-Vance project demands ideological loyalty in exchange for cultural-war solidarity. It does not deliver economic protection.
Put all five together, and you get a picture that does not match either the cheerful liberal narrative or the apocalyptic liberal one. The trans-Atlantic populist alliance is being torn apart by the differing national interests of its constituent parts. The Vance project required the rest of the alliance to stop being European and start being American. They have declined.
The fracture is not, by itself, good news for trans people. The Hungarian election removes a real sponsor of anti-trans politics globally. It does not remove Reform UK’s lead in British polls. It does not remove the Cass Review framework. It does not remove what is happening in South Dakota, where I cannot get medical care in my own state, or in Washington, where the vice president describes my body as engaged in “mutilization.” The European populist right, surviving in nationalized, locally specific forms, is harder to defeat than the unified American-led version, since each variant adapts to its own electorate and is harder to discredit through guilt by association.
What I want from this is not optimism. The data do not support optimism. What I want is clarity. The trans-Atlantic populist alliance is fracturing. The American center of that alliance is more isolated than it was a month ago. The European parts are nationalizing and surviving. The anti-trans social conservatism the alliance carried over remains, now distributed across national contexts that adapt it to local conditions.
There is a temptation, reading three good European stories in one week, to feel as if the tide has turned. The tide has not turned. The tide has revealed that what we thought was a single tide was actually several currents running in different directions, mistaken for a single wave. Some of those currents are running our way now. Most are not. The work is to keep swimming.
Interested in a deeper dive? Read the lengthier research article.
Author Note
Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA and PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She corrects all her papers and articles with Grammarly, since even though she has deep thoughts, she has shallow patience for punctuation. She uses Anthropic’s Claude in Research mode for source location and verification on cited factual claims; all interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
References
Carbonaro, G. (2025, March 5). Trump ally turns on JD Vance over Ukraine remarks: ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong!’ Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/nigel-farage-jd-vance-response-ukraine-2039324
Caryl, C. (2026, March 18). Trump’s Iran war destroys MAGA’s alliance with Europe’s far-right populists. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/18/iran-war-trump-maga-europe-far-right-populist-international/
Casert, R. (2026, May 12). EU diplomats agree to sanction Hamas leaders and Israeli settlers. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/12/g-s1-121581/eu-sanction-hamas-leaders-israeli-settlers
Cooke, M. (2025, October). Have you noticed that Nigel Farage doesn’t talk about Donald Trump anymore? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/have-you-noticed-that-nigel-farage-doesnt-talk-about-donald-trump-anymore-258333
Daw, J. (2026, April). Europe’s far-right desperate to ‘keep their distance’ from Trump. The Mirror US. https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/europes-far-right-desperate-keep-1794931
Diaz, J. (2026, May 8). People who voted for Hungary’s new government broadly support LGBTQ+ rights. LGBTQ Nation. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/05/people-who-voted-for-hungarys-new-government-broadly-support-lgbtq-rights/
European Policy Centre. (2026, February). After Orbán: Why Péter Magyar would not be an easy partner for the EU. EPC. https://www.epc.eu/publication/after-orban-why-peter-magyar-would-not-be-an-easy-partner-for-the-eu/
Euronews. (2026, May 9). Péter Magyar sworn-in as Hungary’s new prime minister after landslide April election victory. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/09/peter-magyar-sworn-in-as-hungarys-new-prime-minister-after-landslide-april-election-victor
ITV News. (2026, May 9). Election results: Farage declares ‘historic shift in politics’ as Starmer says he won’t step down. ITV News. https://www.itv.com/news/2026-05-08/2026-election-results
Liboreiro, J. (2026, April 21). EU court rules Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ law breaches core values. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/21/eu-court-rules-orbans-anti-lgtbq-law-breaches-core-values-calls-on-budapest-to-cancel-it
Magid, J. (2026, May 12). EU foreign ministers approve sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, Hamas leaders. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/eu-foreign-ministers-approve-sanctions-on-violent-israeli-settlers-hamas-leaders/
Reed, E. (2026, April 13). Anti-trans campaigning from JD Vance fails in Hungary: Magyar defeats Orbán. Erin in the Morning. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/anti-trans-campaigning-from-jd-vance
The Dissident. (2026, April). What Hungary’s election actually means for LGBTQ people. The Dissident. https://www.thedissident.news/what-hungarys-election-actually-means-for-lgbtq-people/
Wikipedia. (2026). LGBT rights in South Dakota. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_South_Dakota
YouGov. (2026, May 12). Voting intention, 10-11 May 2026: Ref 28%, Con 17%, Grn 16%, Lab 16%, LD 13%. https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54744-voting-intention-10-11-may-2026-ref-28-con-17-grn-16-lab-16-ld-13
Yurcaba, J. (2023, February 14). South Dakota becomes the 6th state to restrict gender-affirming care for minors. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/south-dakota-becomes-6th-state-restrict-gender-affirming-care-minors-rcna70592