The great reset: the far rights detailed plan to dismantle the EU

Trump hardliners want a power shift in the EU with the help of European allies. Translation:

There are increasing indications that the Trump movement is actively interfering with the political future of the European Union. In March, the most influential conservative think tank in Washington, the Heritage Foundation, invited conservative thinkers from Vienna and Budapest to present their plans for the EU during a workshop.

“It is right for the United States to be involved in the future of Europe,” Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation told Nieuwsuur. According to the prominent conservative thinker, Donald Trump is America's first eurosceptic president. “The United States has protected Europe for so long that European governments should respect America’s views.”

Polish and Hungarian think tanks published an ambitious plan in March to fundamentally reform and dismantle the EU from within. A Hungarian investigative journalist uncovered the project, titled The Great Reset. The proposal was quickly adopted by the Heritage Foundation, the intellectual force behind Project 2025, the ideological blueprint for Trump’s agenda.

Power Back to Nation States

The now-public roadmap includes proposals to strip power from the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. It also calls for renaming the EU to the “European Community of Nations.” Power, according to the document, should return to the individual nation states of Europe.

“These proposals essentially amount to the complete dismantling of the European Commission, which would be reduced to handling only trivial matters,” explains Szabolcs Panyi, the journalist who obtained the document.

Nieuwsuur also spoke with one of the Polish authors of the plan, Zbigniew Przybyłowski of the conservative Ordo Iuris Institute: “We are calling for the restoration of democracy, freedom, and the sovereignty of nations. You could call that a power shift.”

“It’s quite unusual for such an article to appear on the U.S. State Department’s website.”
– Lobbying expert Kenneth Haar

U.S. Government Statement on Europe

In May of this year, a policy document appeared on the website of the U.S. State Department. In it, the American government raised alarm about the current state of Europe. The policy piece described Europe as having “degenerated into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, and restrictions on religious freedom.” It criticized efforts to limit election participation, for example by labeling Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as “extremist.”

The document, titled The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe, called for strengthening ties with far-right and ultraconservative allies in Europe, such as French politician Marine Le Pen, AfD leader Alice Weidel, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders. It is unclear whether the U.S. policy statement was influenced by the Polish-Hungarian Great Reset project.

“There has already been collaboration between the MAGA movement (Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign) and the European far-right,” says Danish lobby researcher Kenneth Haar. “But seeing such a document appear on the U.S. government’s official website is remarkable.”

“The Pro-European Candidate is a Disaster”

Haar points to the Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC) from the U.S., which have been held in Europe for the past three years. “These are very large conferences with hundreds of participants and prominent speakers, involving all major far-right parties in Europe.”

This also occurred recently during a tight race between two Polish presidential candidates. At a special CPAC conference in Poland, Trump’s former Homeland Security Secretary publicly called for a vote in favor of the eurosceptic candidate Karol Nawrocki. She labeled his pro-European opponent “a disaster.” Members of the Trump camp also expressed explicit support this year for Germany’s far-right AfD.

“The Heritage Foundation and the entire MAGA alliance appear to be succeeding in uniting Europe’s far-right parties in a way those parties haven’t been able to achieve on their own,” Haar adds.

Nile Gardiner, Director of European Policy at the Heritage Foundation, sees signs of a shift already: “A wind of change is blowing through Europe, including the Netherlands. There’s growing distrust of the concentration of power among unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.”

Brussels Silent

The European Commission has yet to respond to the ambitions coming from Washington. But according to Hungarian journalist Panyi, Brussels should be paying close attention to the far-reaching American involvement in European politics.

“We see that two EU member states—Hungary and Poland—are trying to shape the future of the EU outside of official decision-making procedures. They are enlisting the help of the U.S. in the hope that Trump will put pressure on the European Commission. That’s a threat.”

Gardiner, on the other hand, sees it as an opportunity. “Europe works best when it is a collaboration between sovereign nation states. The EU, by contrast, is about concentrating political power in Brussels. In 20 to 30 years, the EU will look very different than it does today.”

Disclosure

For this report, Nieuwsuur investigated the plans of European and American think tanks regarding the political future of Europe. Nieuwsuur spoke with experts, MEPs, and journalists from France, the Netherlands, Czechia, Hungary, the UK, Germany, and Poland. We interviewed the following sources:

• Szabolcs Panyi, Hungarian investigative journalist, who uncovered The Great Reset project.

• Kenneth Haar, Danish researcher with the Corporate Europe Observatory, an independent organization tracking U.S. lobbying efforts in the EU.

• Zbigniew Przybyłowski, one of the drafters of The Great Reset, from the Polish Ordo Iuris Institute (privately funded). The project was co-published with the Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), which is largely state-funded by the Hungarian government.

• Nile Gardiner, European Director of the Heritage Foundation, a major pillar of the Trump movement (financially independent). He also recently wrote about Trump’s euroscepticism.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment on Nieuwsuur's questions. The European Commission has not yet responded. Any future statements will be added here.

They should focus on their own political system... We like democracy, F*** off