Something feels different across Europe lately. You don’t need to track polling averages or watch parliamentary debates to notice it. You hear it when people talk about elections with a kind of shrug. You see it when long standing parties lose ground in places, they once considered safe. You feel it when frustration turns into votes, and those votes keep adding up.

Nationalist and right wing parties are no longer sitting on the edges of European politics. They are influencing governments and winning elections. In the latest European Parliament vote, such parties earned about one quarter of the seats. That is not a temporary protest. That is a powerful bloc. “In France, more than 30 percent of voters backed the far right. In Germany, a country that spent decades believing it had learned the lessons of history, a right wing populist party is polling above 20 percent nationwide. In the Netherlands, a right wing party emerged as the largest force with around a quarter of the vote, turning coalition talks into a drawn out political standoff.”

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This change didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and it’s not all about politics. People aren’t heading to the polls because they woke up with new ideas about democracy or Europe. They’re voting because life feels tougher, more uncertain, and a lot less fair than before.

Migration is one of the issues that keeps coming up. Over the past year, irregular arrivals into the European Union again passed 350,000. But when people talk about migration, they rarely start with statistics. They talk about the town that suddenly had a reception centre opened with no warning. They talk........

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