Last month, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban got an election campaign boost from his far-right colleagues across Europe—a coordinated endorsement from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic; and the leaders of France’s National Rally, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Spain’s Vox, and Austria’s Freedom parties. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lent his voice as well, extolling Orban in prerecorded remarks for “the tenacity, the courage, the wisdom to protect his country and to protect his people.”
Orban and the far-rightists who spoke up for him are not the kind of company that Israeli leaders would have kept in the past. If they aren’t overtly antisemitic, they represent the dark forces of nationalism and illiberalism that Israeli leaders have traditionally shunned as not only bad for the Jews living in their countries but also antithetical to Israeli interests and values.
Last month, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban got an election campaign boost from his far-right colleagues across Europe—a coordinated endorsement from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic; and the leaders of France’s National Rally, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Spain’s Vox, and Austria’s Freedom parties. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lent his voice as well, extolling Orban in prerecorded remarks for “the tenacity, the courage, the wisdom to protect his country and to protect his people.”
Orban and the far-rightists who spoke up for him are not the kind of company that Israeli leaders would have kept in the past. If they aren’t overtly antisemitic, they represent the dark forces of nationalism and illiberalism that Israeli leaders have traditionally shunned as not only bad for the Jews living in their countries but also antithetical to Israeli interests and values.
Yet, the endorsement came as no surprise. Netanyahu has been an Orban supporter for a long time. In April 2025, while he was on an official visit to Budapest, Hungary announced it was quitting the International Criminal Court, which has an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu over allegations of war crimes. It was as much an act of personal friendship as it was an expression of the two leaders’ shared disdain for the court and other international institutions.
Ties between Israel and Europe’s far right are not uniformly friendly. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni became critical of Israel as the Gaza war death toll mounted and popular opinion in Italy turned against the country. Efforts by the AfD to warm up to Israel have received a cold shoulder due to concerns about antisemitism. Austria’s Freedom Party is also out of bounds, for now at least.
But the exceptions prove the rule. Last February, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar instructed diplomats to establish formal contacts with the National Rally, Vox, and the Sweden Democrats. “Some of these parties have bad roots,” he acknowledged, “but we look at their deeds in practice today.” The same month, Netanyahu’s Likud party was granted observer status in Patriots for Europe, a bloc within the European Parliament that includes Orban’s Fidesz, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Santiago Abascal’s Vox.
Meanwhile, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli is conducting his own outreach to the far right—in doing so, often testing the limits of official foreign policy—even when it creates friction with the diaspora Jewish communities with whom he is supposed to be the government’s liaison.
An international conference on antisemitism that Chikli called last March was boycotted by many diaspora Jewish leaders because the speaker list was studded with stalwarts of the far right. (This year’s conference, which took place at the end of January, drew less fire but featured right and far-right political leaders and influencers, and virtually no leaders from the diaspora community.) Last October, Chikli invited the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson over the vociferous opposition of British Jewish leaders. The minister’s defense was that Robinson “is a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam” and “a true friend of Israel and of the Jewish people.”
This growing friendship has much to do with the ideological kinship between the global far right and the current Israeli government. Netanyahu’s coalition includes the far-right Religious Zionist and Otzma Yehudit parties, but the outreach comes from within the prime minister’s own Likud party. Netanyahu keeps a tight grip on Israel’s most critical foreign relationships, and whatever else is left is in the hands of Likud ministers such as Sa’ar and Chikli.
Likud was always right of center, but it was a pragmatic sort of rightism concerned principally with national security and ensuring a hard line on the Palestinians. On social issues, the party was centrist, and on the economy, it favored free markets, aligning it with Europe’s traditional center right. Under Netanyahu, however, Likud began drifting rightward, and since it returned to power in 2022, it has often become indistinguishable from the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit. Today, it has been leading an Orban-like drive to neuter and politicize the courts, the civil service, the media, and the universities and the defense establishment, all while harassing and expelling foreign nongovernmental organizations.
But ideological kinship isn’t the only factor at work—there’s a large element of realpolitik, too.
Many of Europe’s far-right parties have dubious pasts in regard to Jews, and even today, they often struggle to keep a lid on the antisemitism of some of their members. But these parties’ front-line issue isn’t Jews—it’s immigration and Europe’s growing Muslim population. And that is the basis for common cause with Israel. Rightly or wrongly, many Israeli leaders blame collapsing support for Israel in Europe, especially since the start of the war with Hamas, on Europe’s growing Muslim population.
“I don’t want to say that Europe was conquered by unchecked immigration,” Netanyahu told a conference in September, “but to a large extent, politically, it’s happening.” Aided and abetted by the European left, Muslim voters have cowed once-friendly mainstream politicians to turn against Israel, the argument goes. He and other Israelis are counting on the far right, once in power, to not only turn back the tide of Muslim immigration but also lead a kulturekampf against “leftist” institutions that are hostile to Israel.
In turn, many rightists are warm to Israel because they imagine it as a role model for their own countries—an illiberal Western democracy, unashamed of its nationalism, that takes no guff from Muslims and Arabs or, for that matter, from multinational institutions or leftist elites—the far right’s other bugbears.
This shared agenda over Europe’s Muslims puts the Jewish communities in Europe in an awkward position. On the one hand, they are anxious about the growing power of the far right. Even if these parties aren’t overtly antisemitic, the hypernationalism that they expound threatens the liberal and tolerant societies that the Jewish diaspora has thrived in. Israel’s outreach to the far right therefore remains unwelcome. On the other hand, European Jews fear the rising Muslim minority, especially as anti-Israel sentiment has grown more vitriolic since Oct. 7, 2023, and often crosses the line into attacks on Jews and antisemitism. In Britain, a poll taken by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research last June found that 11 percent of Jews supported the right-wing populist Reform UK party, up from just 3 percent in the 2024 election. Reform takes a strongly pro-Israel line, but it’s the party’s hard line on immigration that is probably drawing Jewish voters.
There is another element of realpolitik behind Israel’s cultivation of the far right. Orban is widely expected to lose Hungary’s April elections, but in many other countries, far-right parties are leading comfortably in pre-election polling, including the AfD, Reform and National Rally. However skeptical Israeli leaders may be about these parties’ claims to abjure antisemitism, they reason that Israel would do well to cultivate ties with them now. In any case, as support for mainstream parties collapses across Europe and the choice becomes increasingly between parties at the far ends of the political spectrum, strengthening ties with a resolutely anti-Israel far left isn’t an option. Israel is putting its eggs in the only basket that will take them.
Cultivating the right has already paid some dividends. From Israel’s perspective, the EU doesn’t carry significant diplomatic or military weight, certainly not compared to the United States. But the bloc is Israel’s biggest trade partner and is a major source of research funding and partnerships, so Israel cannot afford to ignore it entirely. Yet, despite the growing criticism in Europe of its war conduct in Gaza and steps taken by individual countries, Israel was able to evade EU sanctions over the past two years. That was because far-right governments allied with Israel’s traditional friends inside the EU, like Germany and Austria, succeeded in blocking measures against Israel, most notably a proposal to suspend the bilateral free-trade agreement and sanction far-right Israeli ministers.
Will Israel’s courtship of the far right succeed in making Europe friendlier? The answer is probably not, and the evidence for that can be seen in the United States, where the far-right wing of the MAGA movement has grown increasingly critical of Israel. Influential voices such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Candace Owens have become hostile to varying degrees. Vice President J.D. Vance, who is emerging as the heir apparent in MAGA, has avoided entering the fray. A recent survey by the Manhattan Institute found that while older, veteran Republicans remain friendly to Israel, younger ones and those new to the party are much more critical.
Many of the latter are former Democrats who retain some of their progressive values despite switching parties. Thus, Israel finds itself in a squeeze between MAGA’s America Firsters, who look askance at foreign commitments of any kind, and a new breed of conservatives who share the left’s disgust at Israel’s war conduct. Some of the latter are informed by antisemitic attitudes, the survey found.
Each country’s far right has a unique history and characteristics, but they have in common strong nationalism, a distrust of minorities, and an aversion to transnational institutions and principled commitments to allies. Once in power and more confident that history is on its side, the European right, like the MAGA right in the United States, may very well shed its pro-Israel posture and lean into its antisemitic side.
