But as the Dutch campaign ramped up, Wilders grew much more cautious about invoking the U.S. president. This was no coincidence: By mid-February, when the race in the Netherlands began, Trump had been in office for several weeks, and Dutch voters had gotten a chance to observe him as president. They didn’t like what they saw. “It’s a hard start for Wilders—he’s losing momentum, and this is partly because of Trump,” pollster Gijs Rademaker told The Wall Street Journal. Among poll respondents who had backed the PVV in December but no longer did by February, 60 percent thought Trump was doing a bad job.

Wilders’s caginess about Trump doesn’t seem to have saved him; although PVV gained seats on Wednesday, it fell short of expectations, as well as his own prediction of a surprisingly strong result.

And if Wilders is in fact a victim of Trump backlash in Europe, he might not be the last. While immediate reactions tend to be overly rash, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal noted that immediately after preliminary results came in from the Netherlands, betting markets became much more bearish on the electoral chances of Marine Le Pen, the French presidential candidate who is aligned with Wilders, and who consciously tried to associate herself with Trump:

Le Pen's odds of winning the French election slip below 30% after the Dutch result pic.twitter.com/X0EC1JhdMR — Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) March 15, 2017

In Germany, meanwhile, Martin Schulz of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has found his fortunes surging ahead of September’s general election. The SPD has been lost in the political wilderness for years, finding little purchase against the once-invincible Chancellor Angela Merkel. While Merkel has shown little use for Trump, or his disdain for the EU and NATO, Schulz has seized on the American president as a perfect foil, using him as a vehicle to make the case for European cooperation. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, meanwhile, remains far back, and has seen its standing fall somewhat in recent months.

There’s a danger of overstating Trump’s effect on European politics, especially when viewing the situation from the United States. Internal dynamics play an essential role in each of these elections, and each country has its own problems. But there are good reasons to believe that Trump is playing some role in these contests.

Even before he was formally nominated, Trump was deeply unpopular in Europe. A June 2016 Pew poll found just 9 percent of Europeans had confidence in the Republican. With a few more months to evaluate him, they’ve hardly changed their minds. A YouGov/Handelsblatt poll at the beginning of the year found that sizable majorities in several European countries expected Trump to be a poor president; in France, the only country where a majority did not feel that way, a plurality did. A November poll found rising approval of the EU across the board, another sign of the pendulum potentially beginning to swing back.