Above photo: Solidarity demonstration with Venezuela, Brussels, January 4, 2026. Workers’ Party of Belgium/Facebook.
Europeans have taken to the streets in response to US attacks on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro.
While governments back the Trump administration’s illegal assault.
Demonstrations have taken place across Europe since the United States bombed Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, as people across the region mobilize in defense of sovereignty and international law. European leaders, meanwhile, once again failed to even minimally echo such demands. EU officials including Kaja Kallas, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and several other heads of government more or less explicitly supported the US assault on Caracas, which killed dozens.
Quite unsurprisingly, one of the most ludicrous reactions came from French President Emmanuel Macron, who wrote on social media: “The Venezuelan people are today rid of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship and can only rejoice.” Starmer shared a similar view, stating that the British government “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime.”
These and similar remarks triggered widespread outrage, as growing numbers of people across Europe express alarm over escalating aggression by the second Trump administration and their own governments’ support for it. “A political coward and a pathetic waste of space,” the Peace and Justice Project said of Starmer – a description that, at this point, could apply to all of his European counterparts – “at a time when we need strong leaders to stand up to Trump’s murderous imperialism and defend our rights at home and abroad.”
The mood on the streets, however, stands in sharp contrast to that expressed in government statements. As early as Saturday evening, rallies were organized in solidarity with the Venezuelan people. Over the weekend, demonstrations took place in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and elsewhere, many of them outside US embassies.
“In the crisis of Western capitalism and the drive toward war and rearmament, the aggression against Venezuela is not only an attempt to seize the country’s rich strategic resources,” wrote the Italian left party Potere al Popolo, the trade union Unione Sindacale di Base, and several student organizations in a call for nationwide protests on January 10. “It is also an effort to reassert control over what Washington still considers its ‘backyard,’ and an attack on an alternative model to imperial barbarism.”
In France, left and progressive forces warned that the US assault posed a global threat by re-introducing invasion as a legitimate political tool. “By bombing Caracas and claiming direct control, the US is violating international law and attempting to impose regime change by force,” France Unbowed (La France Insoumise) said. “It is reviving its long tradition of coups, wars, and interference that devastated Latin America in the last century.”
Speaking outside the US embassy in Brussels on Sunday, Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA), called out Belgian and European authorities for refusing to acknowledge the criminal nature of the attack and Maduro’s abduction. “They say this is a ‘legally complex case,’” Mertens said. “He [German Chancellor Friedrich Merz] also called the genocide in Gaza a legally complex case. This is not legally complex; it is legally simple. This is a clear violation of Article 2 of the Charter of the UN.”
Across Europe, protesters rejected the US claim that the attack on Venezuela was linked to counter-drug trafficking operations and protection of democratic processes. “The US is not interested in democracy – not in Palestine, not in Iran, not in Nigeria, not in Somalia, not in Ukraine, and not in Venezuela,” Mertens added. “This is about oil, and they are not even trying to hide it. They say it is about establishing a ‘transition.’ This is not a transition; it is colonial rule.”
“European leaders who refuse to denounce these war crimes and violations of international law are complicit and naive,” he said. “Europe, too, will become a victim of this illegal and criminal regime in Washington.”
