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Notes -
Right-wing parties in Europe owe their popularity primarily to anti-immigrant sentiment. What Trump says/does won't affect that much.
No, but…
Most politicians, especially those who join fringe parties with little prospect of power, have at least a few genuine personal beliefs and aren’t willing to say literally anything to win.
This allows pinning people like Farage (or me) by forcing him to either lose 40% of support or else denounce Trump and MAGA and explicitly side with Ukraine. The latter would be explicitly going against his own judgement and also cut off Trump/Musk support. It’s also probably not a lie he could tell convincingly.
Farage saying that Russia had some reasonable motives for invading Ukraine seems to have massively reduced the number of seats he got in the election - the polls showed a big drop at that time which he never recovered from.
A lot of UK people are fanatical about Ukraine and they hate Russia. This is particularly true of the over 50s who form the main nativist support base in UK.
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