Something has gone quietly wrong at the heart of European politics. Not dramatically wrong — no single moment, no obvious villain. Just a slow, grinding erosion of the thing that democracies depend on most: the sense that governments are actually in charge of anything that matters to ordinary people.
Across the continent, centre-left and centre-right parties that once seemed permanent fixtures are haemorrhaging support. In France, Macron’s project of radical centrism has collapsed into minority governance and parliamentary chaos. In Germany, the SPD-led coalition survived until it didn’t, leaving a country that prides itself on political stability facing elections it hadn’t planned for and a hard-right party, the AfD, polling in second place nationally. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders shocked even his own supporters by winning last year. Sweden, Denmark, Italy — the pattern repeats.
The standard explanation runs through a familiar list: inflation, immigration, Ukraine fatigue, youth disillusionment. All of these are real. But treating them as separate causes misses the deeper logic they share.
Take inflation. European households absorbed a cost-of-living shock that was, in historical terms, brutal and fast. Energy prices doubled; food bills climbed; mortgages became serious problems for people who had assumed they wouldn’t be. Governments responded — with subsidies, with price caps, with emergency packages — and then declared the crisis essentially over once headline inflation fell back. What they missed, or chose not to say clearly, is that prices don’t come back down. The damage is structural. A household that spent an extra €3,000 in 2022 and 2023 simply has less wealth than it did. That isn’t an economic abstraction. It’s a spare bedroom that doesn’t get renovated, a family holiday that doesn’t happen, a retirement timeline that quietly shifts.
What voters received from their governments was not a solution to this problem. They received an explanation of why it wasn’t really the government’s fault — global supply chains, Russian aggression, post-pandemic distortions. These explanations are largely accurate. They are also, politically, almost useless. People don’t vote on the basis of macroeconomic causation. They vote on whether things feel better or worse, and whether anyone in power seems to understand how they live.
Immigration is where this general frustration finds its most charged expression. European political establishments have spent years trying to manage this issue as a technical problem — processing times, asylum procedures, integration programmes — while a substantial portion of their electorates experience it as a cultural one. The mismatch isn’t primarily about racism, though racism exists in it. It’s about the pace of change in working-class cities and towns where social services are already strained, where housing is already expensive, and where the people raising these concerns have spent years being told, by politicians who live nowhere near them, that their anxieties are misplaced or worse.
The hard-right has been extraordinarily effective at occupying this space — not because it has better answers, but because it at least treats the question as legitimate. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the Sweden Democrats, Wilders in the Netherlands: they do not offer coherent immigration policy so much as they offer acknowledgement. That turns out to be surprisingly powerful when the alternative is technocratic condescension.
Then there is Ukraine. Two years into a war that Europe’s leaders assured their publics would be resolved — somehow, eventually — the conflict has become a permanent feature of the political landscape. Defence budgets are rising. Refugee populations remain. Energy markets have been permanently reshaped. European politicians who made bold pledges of support are now dealing with publics who support Ukraine in principle but are increasingly unwilling to accept indefinite costs. This is not moral cowardice. It is a reasonable response to governments that consistently underestimated how long and how expensive this would be.
Beneath all of this runs the particular disenchantment of younger voters. This matters more than it sometimes appears in analysis fixated on pensioner conservatism. Across Europe, the generation now in its twenties and early thirties has grown up through the financial crisis, through a decade of austerity, through a pandemic, through inflation — and has emerged into housing markets that are functionally closed to them in most major cities. They are not predominantly turning right; they are turning away, or turning to parties of the left and hard-left that establishment centrists find uncomfortable to engage with. The German Greens have collapsed in the polls not because their voters became conservative but because those voters see a party that entered government and achieved less than its promises suggested.
None of this adds up to the death of European liberal democracy — a claim that has been made with increasing frequency and increasing prematurity. The institutions are mostly functioning. Courts are still independent. Elections are still free. The wave is real, but it has not, in most countries, actually broken through into government in ways that have fundamentally changed how those countries are run.
What it does add up to is a legitimacy crisis of the traditional centre. The parties that built post-war European prosperity have run out of a convincing account of what they are for, beyond the management of existing systems. They are competent administrators of a world that many of their voters no longer find acceptable. That’s a harder problem than any single policy failure. And the solutions being offered from the populist right — more nationalism, harder borders, less climate policy, confrontation with Brussels — are mostly gestures, not programmes. They work as protest. Whether they work as government is a different question, one that Italy and the Netherlands are now beginning to answer, with results that are, so far, fairly mixed.
The real question for European politics is not whether the traditional parties can stop the bleeding. It’s whether they are capable of asking themselves, honestly, why it started.
sources:
European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)
- Rise to the challengers: Europe’s populist parties and its foreign policy future https://ecfr.eu/publication/rise-to-the-challengers-europes-populist-parties-and-its-foreign-policy-future/
- A sharp right turn: A forecast for the 2024 European Parliament elections https://ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-right-turn-a-forecast-for-the-2024-european-parliament-elections/
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- The European Radical Right in the Age of Trump 2.0 https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/09/the-european-radical-right-in-the-age-of-trump-20
European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS)
- 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism https://www.populismstudies.org/ecps-report-2024-european-parliament-elections-under-the-shadow-of-rising-populism/
The Soufan Center
- Right-Wing Parties in Europe Get a Boost from Recent Political Developments https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-june-6/
Wiley / Journal of Common Market Studies
- Party Dynamics in the 2024 European Parliament Elections https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcms.70003
Cambridge University Press / European Journal of Political Research
- Party convergence and vote switching: Explaining mainstream party decline across Europe https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-political-research/article/abs/party-convergence-and-vote-switching-explaining-mainstream-party-decline-across-europe/7D49E915CDB8F9F4D63CDD5149AEFE75
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