Is abandoning neoliberalism the same thing as adopting protectionism?

I think not.

The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics

Globalist, cosmopolitan critics of neoliberalism may note and celebrate, but do not share the aims of, the essentially protectionist and nationalist populist movements opposing free trade and/or free immigration on economic grounds.

These populisms favor the interests of the working classes and poor native to the nations that lose by free trade or open low-wage immigration over those of the workers of foreign nations that gain.

That is, they favor the interests of better off workers and poor over those of worse off.

Fair trading politicians and cosmopolitan global leftists merely pretend to support those native interests, while protectionist politicians actually do.

The populist right has taken over these issues in Europe and America because they are about competition of nations for advantage, and the left in general has, compared to the right, abandoned the notion that the people of a nation have any legitimate moral or political claim to special solicitude from each other or from their own leaders and government, when their economic or power interests clash with those of foreigners.

More particularly, the left in Europe is also more committed to the EU and everywhere is more committed to the UN and other transnational sources of power and legitimacy than to the nations, even their own nations.

Again more particularly, the left in America disapproves US national power per se in any case, as well as using it exclusively or even primarily to further American interests, even if through peaceful avenues of trade and the like.

And the American left expects the votes of immigrants, and wants besides to use immigration to alter the balance of power among the races in America.

The right, on the other hand, pretty much everywhere is using these same issues as bait, to lure working class votes to help undermine progressive economic and social policies and programs of advantage to those working folk, themselves.

They aren't really going to go in for trade and immigration protection of domestic labor all that much, anyway.

This is true both in Europe and in America, of the anti-EU and anti-immigration, populist right of the Old World and the Trumpism of the New.

Trump might personally be sincere in his protectionism, but the party he leads is dead set against it.