Europe is a continent soaked in economic pessimism. Until we change that, the far right will rise and rise |
How much does Europe’s future resemble its gruesome past? That question was already pressing before Donald Trump retook the White House, and turned support for the European far-right “patriotic” parties into US policy. That is, of course, what his newly published National Security Strategy means, committing the US to “cultivating resistance” in European nations against the supposed “civilisational erasure” represented by immigration.
With or without US interference, far-right authoritarianism is now an entirely plausible European future, unless there is drastic change. After all, it is already the US’s present reality. American exceptionalism once held that such an outcome was impossible in the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic, with its system of separation of powers and no history of despotism. Yet the country is now ruled by a self-styled king, centralising executive power, weaponising the justice system, attacking civil society and neutralising the media.
The advance of the far right rests on a simple, corrosive premise. Since the financial crash, western publics have been encouraged to believe they are trapped in a zero-sum game, forced to compete for ever-diminishing resources. The far right’s message is brutally straightforward: if there is not enough to go around, why are “our” scarce resources being handed to migrants? Remove the undeserving competition, it argues, and the “indigenous” population will flourish once more.
The facts say otherwise. On average, foreign arrivals are net contributors to European economies. Between........