EU parliament leader: Trump a populist with no experience

European Parliament President Martin Schulz on Saturday called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a populist and said he had no experience in foreign policy, Reuters reported.

“Trump belongs to these people that we also have here in Europe, who have a scapegoat for all issues but never have a concrete solution,” Schulz said in an interview with French television i-Tele.

He said neither the US nor Europe were prepared for such an American leader, and added that “Honestly, I prefer another candidate.”

The German-born Schulz has served as President of the European Parliament, one of the major governing bodies of the European Union, since 2012.

The world outside the US has slowly been coming to grips in recent weeks with the growing possibility that the brash New York billionaire might become America’s next president.

The dominant reaction to the effective collapse of the Republican Party establishment in the face of Trump appeared to be jaw-dropping astonishment, mixed with dread at what may lie ahead.

“The Trump candidacy has opened the door to madness: for the unthinkable to happen, a bad joke to become reality,” German business daily Handelsblatt wrote in a recent commentary.

“The meteoric rise of the New York magnate has left half the planet dumbfounded,” wrote columnist Andrea Rizzi in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais.

“To consider Donald Trump a political clown would be a severe misconception,” said another European daily, Salzburger Nachrichten. If Trump is elected to the White House, the Austrian paper predicted, his ideas “would bring major dangers for the USA and the world … basically a nationalist-chauvinist policy that would make America not great but ugly, and risk the stability of the international order.”

Thuraya Ebrahim al-Arrayed, a member of Saudi Arabia’s top advisory body, the Shura Council, said a Trump presidency would be “catastrophic” and set the world back “not just generations, but centuries.”

Writing in the Financial Times of London, Martin Wolf summed up the mood of a good share of Europe’s business and economic elite, arguing that it would be a “global disaster” if Trump made it all the way to the Oval Office.

“Mr. Trump is a promoter of paranoid fantasies, a xenophobe and an ignoramus. His business consists of the erection of ugly monuments to his own vanity. He has no experience of political office. Some compare him to Latin American populists,” Wolf wrote.

In the Mexican newspaper Reforma, columnist Sergio Aguayo compared anti-Mexican sentiments unleashed by Trump to the anti-communist Red Scares of the 20th century, and accused Trump of igniting a “brown panic.”

In Europe, where some also feel their nations are being submerged by waves of foreign migrants and violent Islamic radicalism is a real danger, not all have condemned Trump. Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front, has said that if he were an American, he would cast his ballot for Trump. On Wednesday, Laurent Wauquiez, a French conservative lawmaker, said Trump’s popularity is revealing of a general trend that has traversed the Atlantic.

“What it shows is that in democracies today, citizens no longer want people to tell them what they should think, what they should say. That’s what makes Donald Trump seductive,” Wauquiez told France 2 Television.

AP contributed to this report.