Leaders in Europe and beyond greeted the Republican Party's defeat in the US midterm elections with relief on Wednesday, hoping the result might ease President Donald Trump's combative America First foreign policy. Reporting from London, the Associated Press said that hope was tempered by the expectation that the vote would not end the US conflict with Iran, change tariff policy, or strengthen Trump's limited support for Ukraine and America's European allies.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, speaking during a visit to the Commonwealth summit in Antigua, said he hoped the results would focus minds in Washington and other capitals on ending the Iran war, which has sent fuel prices soaring and frustrated voters. He said the world had an opportunity to unite around the cost of living, and that he could not ease those pressures until the Middle East conflict was resolved. He also named the war in Ukraine started by Russia as a priority.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X that Americans had voted against hate, machismo, climate denialism and the privileges of elites. He said the same shift had happened in Brazil, had just happened in the United States, and would happen soon in Spain, where he faces an election on 29 November. Progressive politicians cast the US result as part of a wider liberal recovery after recent defeats for right-wing populists in Hungary, Brazil and Serbia. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said most Americans had sent a clear message that they had had enough of MAGA and of polarisation and wanted a different course.
Others cautioned that Trump remains in office for two more years and still holds wide influence over foreign policy after his party lost both houses of Congress. He has berated European leaders over immigration and wind farms, roiled their economies with tariffs, threatened to pull the United States out of NATO and expressed a desire to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark. Many in Europe say US security guarantees are unlikely to return to the way they were before Trump.
Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger said that, independently of the election outcome, security and prosperity in Austria and Europe must not depend on how people in Kansas or Iowa vote, which is why Europe is strengthening its own defence capability and competitiveness. Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America programme at the Chatham House think tank, said she did not expect a moment in which the US relationship with Europe simply returns to its earlier form. She described the administration's approach as transactional and deeply sceptical of the value Europe can offer in defence, and said Congress will find it easier to constrain Trump at home than on foreign policy. Democrats have said they will hold votes on the Iran war, she noted, but meaningfully limiting some of his unilateral tools will be difficult.
The Trump administration has tried to pressure Ukraine to end a war that Russia started with its full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukraine accused Washington of delaying delivery of vital interceptor missiles and reported that a temporary disruption to the Starlink and Starshield satellite internet service impeded its defence against Russian attacks. Last month, even as he fired insults at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump waived sanctions on Russia that Congress had overwhelmingly approved in legislation aimed at supporting Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russia hoped Trump would continue his peacemaking efforts regardless of the election outcome.
Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's centre-right bloc, told ARD television he hoped Republicans would see the result in part as voters' verdict on what he called Trump's wrong foreign policy, and that the president would exercise more reason on foreign affairs. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a target of Trump's baseless claims that his government discriminates against the country's white minority, said Democratic control of both houses of Congress would introduce a new era in world relations.