The former ‘conservative’ Prime Minister of Sweden has said the election of Donald Trump “is the end of the West as we know it” and the President-elect’s friend Nigel Farage represents “dark forces”.
Carl Bildt, who ruled the Nordic nation from 1991 to 1994 and served as its Foreign Minister between 2006 and 2014, claimed that: “When Trump receives the jubilant British anti-Europe campaigner Nigel Farage before seeing other foreign politicians, he is sending the worst possible signal to Europe.
“By design or by default, he transmits a signal of support to those dark forces in various countries trying to undo what generations of U.S. and European statesmen have worked to achieve”, he wrote in a column for the Washington Post.
It was pointed out online to Mr. Bildt that Mr. Trump’s priority is probably not ingratiating himself with liberal Europe. Furthermore, Mr. Trump and Mr. Farage have both been frank about their wish to undo much of what previous leaders have done. He did not respond.
On the eighth of November, the former leader of Sweden’s centre-right Moderates Tweeted a picture of himself stood with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, captioned: “The vote is for the citizens of the US, but clear with whom the hope of most of the world is today.”
In his scathing opinion piece for the Washington Post this week, he continued:
“It is only with effort that the leaders of Europe have managed to compose themselves after the US election, torn between pure shock over the result and the necessity of preserving what can be preserved of the West and the Atlantic relationship”.
Adding: “If you listen to what Donald Trump has been saying during and before his campaign, this is the end of the West as we know it”.
He listed “signature achievements and goals of the past few year” which Mr. Trump allegedly threatened, including the Paris global climate agreement, the Iran Nuclear deal, and “important free-trade agreements”.
“Now the raw populism of the campaign will have to be turned into U.S. policy, and E.U. leaders will naturally be keen to see if this process will moderate some or all of these campaign promises”, he concluded.