The edifices of the age of globalisation are toppling one by one. The institutions of our multilateral world are fading. The cult of diversity, equity and inclusion is going into reverse. The liberal media has lost its monopoly on setting agendas as people turn to alternative news sources. After the murder of Charlie Kirk, things will only get worse.
Ever since the Fifties, as it has declined culturally and economically, Europe has followed all the big American trends. The Austrians gave us the grand café, a place where you could sit down, drink good coffee and read a newspaper. But today, young Europeans buy low-grade, over-sugared coffees in US coffee chains. If you did not know that Neapolitans invented the pizza, you might think it came from New York. And don’t get me started on hamburgers.
We Europeans may have invented democracy, communism, and fascism, and everything else in between, but into our current void, we are importing America’s political culture; Euro-versions of Donald Trump are going to be elected across the continent.
The underlying causes that birthed the MAGA movement exist in Europe too. Immigration has gone up. Police are failing to crack down on crimes committed by immigrants. Central banks have created massive inequality over the last 15 years, with their asset purchases and the stabilisation of markets, which the general public paid for through higher inflation and lower disposable real income. We are already seeing the influence of the populist Right rising — spearheaded by Victor Orban in Hungary — but it is about to go mainstream.
Let’s imagine the 2030 G8 meeting in Moscow, hosted by President Putin, who will have just celebrated his 30th anniversary of taking power. He will welcome President JD Vance, Prime Minister Farage of the UK, President Le Pen of France, and Chancellor Weidel of Germany. Meloni will be the longest-serving member of the group. This, of course, is assuming the junket even takes place — leaders might not have anything left to say to each other.
“The Weimar Republic collapsed under its own inability to govern, and to procure economic welfare.”
Meanwhile, the EU will be in crisis — if indeed it has managed not to splinter by then. The bloc has been fracturing since the start of the century, but by 2030, European leaders, each one for themselves, will be trying to make their own countries great again. Its coffin will be all but sealed.
Such a scenario doesn’t sit easily with the liberal-Left narrative — that there is no alternative to a multilateral globalist world, and that Trump is only a passing phenomenon. But when Trump was elected for the first time, in 2016, the Europeans missed their chance to assert themselves. They failed to make themselves more independent on defence because that would have required deep cuts to European welfare states, which were essentially financed by the peace dividend. It would have required a merger of European defence procurement agencies, and a loss of national sovereignty over armament policies. For the members of the eurozone, it would have required greater political and fiscal integration to establish the euro as a rival to the dollar. European countries chose the exact opposite. Having failed to integrate, the EU chose to regulate. And the UK left. Today, the EU is just too economically weak to stand up to Trump.
It is technically falling behind, too. The last big thing the Germans ever did was to perfect the diesel engine in the Eighties and Nineties. It is another espresso and pizza story. The Germans invented the car; they discovered quantum mechanics; they found themselves a then still lucrative niche in the world of mid-tech engineering, the world of widgets. But this world of 20th-century technology is now outdated. It no longer keeps on giving.
Pro-Europeans may celebrate the EU in its current state as a regulator and a soft power — but these are soft-brained goals. I used to favour European integration, hoping that it would become a united, strategic global actor, one that would have taken economic and military integration further. Instead, the EU is little other than a customs union and a single market for products mainly: a global irrelevance. Europe is a junior partner. A footsoldier.
Europeans also foolishly believed that demography favoured the centre-Left. At the end of the last decade, Europe’s youth may have firmly sided with the Left and the Greens, but for Greta Thunberg and many of her followers, this turned out to be a phase. In the elections earlier this year, the far-Right Alternative for Germany came first among the young. It’s a pattern that is repeating through all our elections. In America, Charlie Kirk turned MAGA into a youth movement, and in Europe, we are now hearing its echo.
Is anyone really surprised? To listen to the political discourse in Germany and France, you would think that the older generation cares only for its own privileges. And we have reached the point in our economic development where we can no longer expect our children to be better off than we are; young Europeans are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis as the economy fails them and the establishment ignores them. As a result, I predict a devastating rebellion will come from the young Right — the majority of whom aren’t on anti-immigration demos, they’re online.
My overall point is that all the underlying forces which are driving US voters, and especially young ones to the Right, are here too — except that Europe is lagging behind in its political response. Until now, what has been stopping the rise of parties of the Right in Europe is their single-minded focus on immigration. We know whom they hate, but we are less sure about how they will govern. Do they even have an economic policy? Do they have a worked-out fiscal plan? I yet to see anything coherent from any party of the Right.
But this could be about to change. Germany’s AfD is waking up to the fact that it needs an economic policy. In the polls, the party is neck-and-neck with Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU. I see Merz’ coalition heading for failure — a failure to accomplish the goal of reversing Germany’s economic decline. And in this, the coalition is in a very similar spot to the UK’s Labour government. Both will raise taxes because they can’t bring themselves to cut social spending. And so the moment will come where the AfD will be the only party in Germany with a credible promise to offer real economic reform. In the UK, meanwhile, Nigel Farage hasn’t worked out an economic plan, but I do expect him to decouple from the regulation of the EU and to lower taxes — both necessary prerequisites for the UK to find a lucrative economic niche outside the EU.
The experience of Right-wing leadership inside the EU itself will be messier. The far-Right there is mostly anti-libertarian. Some, like Le Pen’s party, are as corporatist as the established parties of the centre. There will be failures and successes as the economy stalls and the political establishment offers no viable alternatives.
This was also the case in Germany in the early Thirties. The parallel to be drawn is not between Hitler and modern leaders of the Right — it is absurd to claim that Trump is a fascist dictator. No, the eerie similarity is with the Weimar Republic, as it collapsed under its own inability to govern, and to procure economic welfare.
I expect to see a version of that period repeating itself, in the way Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
There may be something farcical about the discourse of the Right; but as complacent liberals mock and refuse to change path, the Right will keep rising. And that is why we will end up with our own Trumps in Europe: we have tried everything else.
