In France, President Emmanuel Macron is trying to hold shut the far-right floodgates in two rounds of parliamentary voting finishing on July 7; Germany's centrist government suffered a stinging rebuke when a far-right party notched second place in the country's European parliament elections this month.

There has sometimes been a certain synchronicity in American and British politics — Brexit's narrow approval came months before Trump's 2016 presidential victory — and prominent Trump backers have taken delighted notice of far-right gains in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.

Before, during and after the former U.S. president's turn in office, Farage worked strenuously to insert himself into the Trumpian orbit, albeit as something of a distant satellite.

In a recent interview with Britain's ITV, Farage declared that Trump had likely "learned a lot" from his own incendiary, insult-laden speeches in the European parliament, where he previously held a seat — but added, magnanimously, that the tutelage went both ways.

Farage's sloganeering echoes Trump's — "make Britain great again" — and he relishes describing the country as being in a state of terminal decline and branding opponents "boring idiots."

Trump, for his part, was an avowed fan of Brexit, and his campaign hinges on many of the same social divisions that animate Farage's run: immigration, economic dissatisfaction and culture wars.

Some political commentators, and Farage himself, have suggested the voting results might leave him positioned to essentially capture a hollowed-out Conservative party — a scenario likened by some to events across the Atlantic, where Trump's MAGA movement has seized control of the Republican establishment.

"Postelection, there may be a bid for forces from Reform to stage some kind of takeover of the Conservatives, perhaps involving Farage if he is elected" as a member of Parliament, said Andrew Blick, a politics and contemporary history professor at King's College London.

"I don't know if this will be successful, but if it were, the Conservatives would look more like the Trump-era Republicans," he said. That would leave a victorious Labor party and prospective new prime minister, Keir Starmer, facing a far more extremist and intransigent political opposition.

For all the fandom that can be seen out on the campaign trail, Farage triggers strong negative pushback from across much of the political spectrum. He has been pilloried for saying NATO provoked Russia's war against Ukraine, for blatantly misogynistic remarks, and for repeated expressions of what critics call thinly veiled racist sentiments.

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