Europe Views US With Less Alarm After Midterm Vote

Democrats won the US midterm elections held in the week before November 12, 2026. Erik Jones, director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, said that Europeans are looking at the United States with much less horror than they have over the past two years.

The midterms are elections for the US Congress, the national legislature, held halfway through a president's four-year term. They decide which party controls the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they often serve as a referendum on the sitting president.

Europe played little part in the campaign itself. Neither Democrats nor Republicans spoke much about European issues. Donald Trump's handling of the war in Ukraine, his approach to Greenland, a Danish territory in the Arctic, and his posture toward the European Union were not on the midterm agenda.

Some Democrats have discussed using the next government funding bill to block money for the war in Iran. A funding bill is the legislation Congress passes to pay for federal government operations, and such bills are a common vehicle for attaching conditions. The proposal has been discussed; it has not been adopted.

Analysts quoted in the same report say the US shift away from Europe did not begin with Trump. They trace it to Barack Obama's presidency, when Washington began a strategic reorientation toward Asia.