🔗 Share this article

Over a twelve months after the election that delivered Donald Trump a decisive comeback victory, the Democratic party has yet to issued its postmortem analysis. But, recently, an prominent progressive lobby group released its own. Kamala Harris's campaign, its authors contended, failed to connect with key voter blocs because it did not focus enough on addressing everyday financial worries. In focusing on the threat to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, liberals overlooked the kitchen-table concerns 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 recently published national security strategy makes clear, is optimistic that “patriotic” parties in Europe will soon mirror 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 working-class voters. But among establishment politicians and parties, it is difficult to see a response that is sufficient to troubling times.

Major Challenges and Costly Solutions

The issues Europe faces are expensive and era-defining. They encompass the war in Ukraine, maintaining 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 European research institute, the new age of geopolitical insecurity could necessitate an additional €250bn in annual EU defence spending. A major report last year on European economic competitiveness called for massive investment in shared infrastructure, to be financed in part by collective EU debt.

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

But, at both the EU-wide and national levels, there continues to be a lack of boldness when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “budget hawks resist the idea of collective borrowing, and EU spending plans for the next seven years are deeply unambitious. In France, the idea of a tax on the super-rich is overwhelmingly popular with voters. Yet the beleaguered centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – will not consider such a move.

The Price of Inaction

The truth is that in the absence of such measures, the less affluent will pay the price of financial adjustment through austerity budgets and greater inequality. Acrimonious recent conflicts over pension cutbacks in both France and Germany highlight a developing struggle over the future of the European social model – a trend 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 stated that it would focus any benefit cuts at foreign residents.

Avoiding a Political Gift for Nationalists

Across the Atlantic, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were largely insincere, as later Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy underlined. Yet in the absence of a compelling progressive alternative from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Absent a fundamental change in fiscal policy, social contracts across the continent are in danger of being ripped up. Policymakers must steer clear of handing this political gift to the Trumpian forces already on the march in Europe.