More than a year after the election that handed Donald Trump a decisive comeback victory, the Democratic party has still not released its postmortem analysis. But last week, an influential progressive lobby group published its own. Kamala Harris’s campaign, its authors argued, failed to connect with core constituencies because it did not focus enough on addressing basic economic anxieties. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, progressives neglected the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds.
As the EU braces for a tumultuous period of politics between now and the end of the decade, that is a lesson that needs to be fully absorbed in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. The White House, as its recently published national security strategy makes clear, is hopeful that “patriotic” parties in Europe will soon replicate Mr Trump’s success. In the EU’s Franco-German engine room, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) lead the polls, backed by large swaths of blue-collar voters. But among mainstream leaders and parties, it is hard to discern a response that is adequate to troubling times.
The challenges Europe faces are expensive and era-defining. They include the war in Ukraine, maintaining the momentum of the green transition, addressing demographic change and developing economies that are less vulnerable to bullying by Mr Trump and China. According to the Brussels-based Breugel thinktank, the new age of geopolitical insecurity could require an additional €250bn in annual EU defence spending. Mario Draghi’s report last year on European economic competitiveness demanded massive investment in public goods and infrastructure, to be partly funded by jointly held EU debt.
Such a fiscal paradigm shift would boost growth figures that have flatlined for years. But at both the pan-European and national levels, there continues to be a lack of boldness when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “frugal” nations oppose the idea of collective borrowing, and Brussels’ budget proposals for the next seven years are deeply unambitious. In France, the idea of a wealth tax on the super-rich is overwhelmingly popular with voters. But Emmanuel Macron’s beleaguered centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.
The reality is that in the absence of such measures, the less well-off will pay the price of financial adjustment through austerity budgets and greater inequality. Bitter recent disputes over pension cutbacks in both France and Germany testify to a developing struggle over the future of the European social model – a phenomenon that the RN and the AfD have happily exploited to promote a politics of welfare chauvinism. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has opposed moves to raise the retirement age and has said that it would target any benefit cuts at non-French nationals.
In the US, Mr Trump’s pledges to protect blue‑collar interests were deeply disingenuous, as subsequent Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy underlined. But in the absence of a convincing progressive counteroffer from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Without a fundamental change in economic approach, social contracts across the continent risk being ripped up. Governments must avoid handing this political gift to the Trumpian forces already on the march in Europe.
