The Guardian view on combating Europe’s national populists: protect the less well-off from the winds of change | Editorial

13 hours ago7 min read

The European project, that grand and fragile experiment in shared sovereignty and social solidarity, stands at a precipice not seen since the Maastricht debates of the early 1990s. The warning from across the Atlantic is stark and must be heeded: the postmortem of the recent US election, as published by a progressive lobby group, indicts the Harris campaign for a fatal misalignment of priorities.By framing the contest primarily as a defence of democratic norms against MAGA authoritarianism, it failed to resonate with the core economic anxieties of the electorate—the very anxieties now being masterfully exploited by Europe’s own national populists. In Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, this is not merely an academic lesson; it is an urgent strategic imperative.The continent’s foundational social model, a compact that promised to cushion citizens from the harshest winds of globalisation and technological change, is under direct assault. The White House’s national security strategy, with its curious nod to ‘patriotic’ parties, seems almost to anticipate their replication of Donald Trump’s success.Indeed, the polling data paints a disquieting picture: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the Alternative für Deutschland are not fringe irritants but leading political forces, their support drawn in significant part from the traditional blue-collar base that once anchored social democratic parties. This realignment is the central political fact of our era in Europe.Yet, among the mainstream political establishments—the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Liberals—the response has been characterised more by hand-wringing and technocratic tinkering than by the bold, new economic approach the moment demands. The challenge is existential.It requires moving beyond mere condemnation of populist rhetoric to a clear-eyed diagnosis of its appeal. For decades, the EU’s economic policy orthodoxy has prioritised market integration, fiscal discipline, and competitiveness, often at the expense of robust social investment and industrial policy at the continental scale.The result has been a growing perception, and often a reality, of insecurity: stagnant wages in deindustrialised regions, precarious work in the gig economy, and a sense that the benefits of the single market flow disproportionately to metropolitan elites and capital owners. This fertile ground of discontent is where the Le Pens and the Weidels sow their seeds of nationalist resentment, offering simplistic, inward-looking solutions that scapegoat immigrants and Brussels bureaucrats.To combat this effectively requires a dual strategy of unwavering democratic defence and profound economic renewal. The former is necessary but, as the US example shows, insufficient alone.

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#European politics

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