Nationalist parties are notching election victories and leading in the polls across Europe. One recipe for their success: keeping their distance from Trump and his MAGA allies.

Leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which finished first in two recent regional elections, have scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues.

In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling in first ahead of next year’s election, has kept Trump and his allies out of her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.

In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is now set to lead a state government for the first time, the party campaigned on deporting migrants and cutting funding to museums with “anti-patriotic goals.”The policies could have come straight out of MAGA’s playbook, yet Trump and the U.S. were largely absent during the campaign.

“I can’t remember them being mentioned once,” said AfD politician Leif-Erik Holm, who finished first in a regional election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of his own campaign, which ended two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote.

The absence of the American allies in recent campaigns marked a contrast from the early days of the Trump administration when MAGA and European nationalists showed a united front.

In January 2025, ahead of a general election in Germany, billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk joined an AfD rally by video link, urging Germans to shed their guilt about the country’s past, in remarks widely viewed as referencing the Holocaust. The next month in Munich, Vice President JD Vance blasted European leaders for their efforts to keep the far right out of power. Around that time, Le Pen said European nationalists were the only ones able to speak Trump’s political language.

Backing Europe’s antiestablishment right became an official goal of the U.S. government. The State Department said it would provide grants to organizations promoting what it described as European sovereignty and other conservative values. Late last year, an updated U.S. national-security strategy said the U.S. supported “patriotic European parties” and would cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”This year, however, Trump’s popularity has slipped in polls and with it positive views of the U.S. An increasing number of countries view China more favorably than the U.S., and Xi Jinping as a more credible leader in managing world affairs, according to a Pew Research Center report in mid-July based on a 36-country survey.

Polls show many right-wing Europeans share unfavorable views of Trump.

“A lot of people say Trump is arrogant, dangerous, not well-qualified. You see an intensification in his second term of things people didn’t like in the first term,” said Richard Wike, Pew’s director of global attitudes research. “That may create incentives for all sorts of political leaders not to embrace him.”The White House said Trump has restored U.S. power and strengthened alliances. “The president will never settle for the West’s managed decline and will continue to unapologetically advance our interests at home and abroad,” the White House said.

Earlier in the year, many European nationalist leaders broke publicly with Trump over the Iran war. “It looks like they launched this campaign without much of a concept. It’s a bit of a disaster,” said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel.

In the campaigns that have followed, Europeans have mostly been de-emphasizing, rather than actively criticizing, Trump.

Still, some credit early U.S. support for lending legitimacy to parties that are challenging the establishment. “It helped us mature and convinced some people who were still skeptical to give us a chance,” Holm said of the AfD.

“Having said that, the interaction is no longer that outwardly,” he added. “The contacts of course still exist and are important, but the global situation has now become more difficult and some people may be more skeptical with regard to the Trump administration.”Trump’s positions on a range of issues, including tariffs, Greenland and the war in Ukraine, often clashed with European interests, making it difficult for nationalists in the region to support his policies. The war in Iran, which drove up global energy prices, only deepened the divide.

In April, one of Trump’s closest allies in Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, lost his re-election bid, despite support from Trump and Vance in the final stretch of his campaign.

There are other signs American conservatism isn’t taking hold in Europe. In July in London, efforts to launch the first U.K. version of the American CPAC conference on British soil fell flat, with rows of empty seats at many sessions and an absence of MAGA paraphernalia, according to attendees. Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, who presided over the conference, had earlier called for a Trump-style “revolution” in Britain and Europe.

An often-raucous gathering of the American right dating to the 1970s, the Conservative Political Action Conference didn’t translate well into the more buttoned-up world of British politics, some observers said.

“British conservatism, British patriotism, and British populism, if you want to call it that, have their own character,” said Claire Bullivant, chief executive of the Great British PAC, a political-action committee she founded that is modeled after American PACs. Nonetheless, many of Trump’s ideas are here to stay, even if he is out of favor, Bullivant said.

CPAC’s U.S. chairman, Matt Schlapp, called the London event a success. “We look forward to growing the CPAC movement in Great Britain and around the world,” he said in an George Weinberg, the Berlin-based head of Republicans Overseas and a key go-between for AfD officials seeking an introduction to MAGA figures, said the ties between MAGA and Europe’s nationalists hadn’t been severed. They were continuing out of sight for political reasons, he said.

“They are still calling, visiting, bringing me bottles of wine, but now it’s more under the radar,” said Weinberg. “They are politicians, you know, they want to win elections.”After the AfD’s triumph in Saxony-Anhalt, Trump congratulated the party in a social media message. Other Republicans and MAGA figures, including Musk, Mike Lee, Richard Grenell and Anna Paulina Luna, followed suit.

Trump’s message of support for the opposition drew an angry reaction from the government in Berlin, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz canceling a planned call with the U.S. president. The praise, meanwhile, went largely unacknowledged by the AfD.

“This unlimited enthusiasm for MAGA among some of us, that is gone,” said Peter Felser, a senior AfD lawmaker in Berlin. “I would say we’ve grown up. We don’t have to agree [with the U.S.] on everything. We have our own positions.”Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com and Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com