🔗 Share this article

More than a twelve months after the election that handed Donald Trump a clear-cut comeback victory, the Democratic Party has yet to issued its election autopsy. However, last week, an influential progressive lobby group published its own. The Harris campaign, its authors contended, failed to connect with key voter blocs because it failed to concentrate enough on tackling everyday financial worries. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Trumpist populism represented, progressives neglected the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds.

A Warning for Europe

As the EU braces for a turbulent era of politics from now until the end of the decade, that is a message that must be fully absorbed in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. The White House, as its newly released national security strategy makes clear, is hopeful that “patriotic” parties in Europe will quickly mirror Mr Trump’s success. Within Europe's core nations, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) lead the polls, supported by large swaths of blue-collar voters. But among mainstream leaders and parties, it is difficult to see a response that is sufficient to troubling times.

Major Problems and Costly Solutions

The issues Europe faces are expensive and era-defining. They encompass the war in Ukraine, sustaining the momentum of the green transition, dealing with demographic change and developing economies that are less vulnerable to bullying by Mr Trump and China. According to a Brussels-based research institute, the new age of geopolitical insecurity could necessitate an additional €250bn in yearly EU defence spending. A significant report last year on European economic competitiveness demanded massive investment in public goods, to be financed in part by collective EU debt.

Such a fiscal paradigm shift would stimulate growth figures that have flatlined for years.

However, at both the pan-European and national levels, there remains a lack of boldness when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “budget hawks resist the idea of shared debt, and EU spending plans for the next seven years are profoundly timid. In France, the idea of a tax on the super-rich is widely supported with voters. But the embattled centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Price of Inaction

The reality is that without such measures, the less affluent will pay the price of financial adjustment through austerity budgets and increased inequality. Bitter recent disputes over pension cutbacks in both France and Germany testify to a developing struggle over the future of the European welfare state – a trend that the RN and the AfD have eagerly leveraged to promote a politics of nativist social policy. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has opposed moves to raise the retirement age and has said that it would focus any benefit cuts at non-French nationals.

Preventing a Strategic Advantage for Populists

In the US, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were deeply disingenuous, as later Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy underlined. But without a convincing progressive alternative from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Absent a fundamental change in economic approach, social contracts across the continent risk being torn apart. Policymakers must steer clear of giving this electoral boon to the Trumpian forces already on the march in Europe.