Europe's Long Reckoning
The continent that invented liberal democracy is struggling to defend it. The far right is not the cause — it is the symptom of something deeper.
The statistics about Europe's far right have become so familiar that they no longer shock. In Germany, the AfD polls at more than 20 percent — the strongest showing by a far-right party in the country since the 1930s. In France, Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National won the first round of the 2024 legislative elections with 33 percent of the vote. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni leads a government coalition anchored by a party whose founding documents venerate Mussolini. In Hungary and Slovakia, governments that openly challenge the rule of law norms of the European Union have retained democratic majorities.
The mainstream response to these data points — to treat them as aberrations, as the result of specific bad actors exploiting misinformation, as problems to be solved by better communication of liberal values — has failed. It has failed not because liberal values are wrong but because it misidentifies the nature of the challenge.
The rise of the European far right is not primarily a political problem. It is a social one, rooted in changes to the structure of European economies and societies that the liberal center has been consistently unwilling to name clearly, let alone address.
The signal: deindustrialization as political precondition
The geography of far-right support in Europe is not random. It tracks with remarkable precision the geography of industrial decline. The former Communist states of East Germany, the Rust Belt regions of northern France, the Welsh valleys, the small manufacturing towns of northern Italy — these are the heartlands of European populism, and they are places that experienced, over three to four decades, the destruction of the economic base that had organized their societies.
Deindustrialization in Europe was not a natural process. It was a policy outcome — the result of trade liberalization, euro-zone architecture that constrained fiscal responses to regional economic shocks, and labor market reforms that increased flexibility for employers while reducing security for workers. These policies had genuine economic benefits: they reduced inflation, increased productivity in services sectors, and contributed to several decades of aggregate growth. They also concentrated the costs of adjustment in specific communities, specific generations, and specific classes, while distributing the benefits broadly.
The communities that bore the concentrated costs did not vote far right immediately. They voted for the traditional left parties that had historically represented them — until those parties, beginning in the 1990s, embraced the center-left synthesis that prioritized social liberalism and European integration over the class-based economic interests of their traditional constituencies. At that point, voters who felt economically abandoned began to look for alternatives. They found them in parties that offered what the center had stopped providing: economic protection, cultural recognition, and a clear answer to the question of who was responsible for their situation (immigrants, globalists, Brussels bureaucrats).
What immigration policy got wrong
Immigration has been the political accelerant of European populism, but the liberal center's failure on immigration goes beyond the policy itself to a deeper failure of political honesty.
The economic evidence on immigration is complex: immigrants broadly contribute to aggregate economic growth, particularly in aging societies with tight labor markets; they also have distributional effects that disproportionately affect low-skilled native workers who compete with immigrant labor in specific sectors and regions. The liberal center, which found the first part of this evidence congenial, consistently downplayed the second part — not because the evidence was unavailable but because acknowledging it complicated the preferred narrative.
Voters in deindustrialized regions who said that immigration was making their lives harder were told, repeatedly, that they were wrong on the economics or that their concerns were coded racism. Some of those concerns were racist. Many were not. The failure to distinguish between them — to engage honestly with the distributional effects of migration policy while refusing to accommodate ethnic nationalism — produced exactly the political dynamic it was designed to prevent: a hardening of anti-immigrant sentiment among voters who felt their legitimate concerns had been dismissed.
Metaculus forecasts a 67 percent probability that at least two additional EU member states will have government coalitions led by right-populist parties by 2028. The trajectory is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of a quarter-century of center politics that prioritized aggregate outcomes over distributional ones.
The EU's structural vulnerability
The European Union was designed for consensus. Its decision-making architecture requires unanimity for most significant actions; its institutions lack enforcement mechanisms that can override member state governments without triggering constitutional crises; its democratic legitimacy deficit — the persistent gap between EU-level decision-making and meaningful voter participation — has grown rather than shrunk as integration has deepened.
Hungary's Viktor Orbán has exploited this architecture with more sophistication than any other European leader. By maintaining formal adherence to EU membership criteria while systematically dismantling the independent institutions that give those criteria meaning — free press, independent judiciary, academic freedom, electoral integrity — he has demonstrated that EU membership and autocratic consolidation are not mutually exclusive. The EU's Article 7 procedure, designed to address member state violations of EU values, has produced sanctions that have been largely ineffectual; Orbán's response has been to deepen the violations while continuing to absorb EU structural funds that finance his political patronage networks.
The Hungarian case matters beyond Hungary because it is a model. Slovakia's Robert Fico, who returned to power in 2023, has moved toward an Orbán-style governance model more quickly than most analysts anticipated. If the AfD reaches federal government participation in Germany — Kalshi was trading a contract on AfD entering a German government coalition before 2028 at 38 percent — the architecture of European politics changes fundamentally, not because the AfD would necessarily govern in an Orbán-like manner but because their presence in government would normalize the far right's claims and further erode the cordon sanitaire that has contained them.
What center politics has consistently failed to understand
The center's diagnosis of European populism has remained remarkably stable and remarkably wrong: the problem is misinformation, the solution is better communication, and voters who support far-right parties are victims of manipulation who would return to mainstream parties if they had access to accurate information.
This diagnosis is comforting for center politicians because it externalizes the problem — it locates the failure not in center policies but in the information environment that has surrounded them. It is wrong for the same reason.
Voters who support far-right parties are not primarily doing so because they have been misinformed. They are doing so because the political economy of the past thirty years has not worked for them, because the cultural politics of the progressive center has made them feel that their identity and community are objects of condescension rather than respect, and because the parties that once represented their interests have stopped doing so in any meaningful sense.
The path back from European populism runs not through better fact-checking but through genuinely different economic and social policy — and that path is harder, more expensive, and more politically costly than anything the center has been willing to contemplate.
Indicators to watch
— German coalition arithmetic after 2025 federal elections: whether mainstream parties can govern without the AfD determines whether the cordon sanitaire holds in Europe's largest economy — French pension reform protests and RN polling: the relationship between economic grievance and far-right support is most directly legible in France — ECB rate policy and regional divergence: continued tight money in a fragmented euro zone creates the economic conditions in which far-right alternatives gain traction — EU budget negotiations and Hungarian obstruction: Orbán's willingness to block EU aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip signals how far member state autocratization can proceed before the EU's coherence is genuinely threatened
Europe is not losing its democracy. It is in a contest for its democracy, one that the liberal center has been consistently underperforming in. The outcome is not determined. But the signals are clear enough that treating them as noise has become a choice, not a mistake.
Sophie Laurent is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering European politics and international affairs. She is based in Paris.