🔗 Share this article

More than a twelve months following the election that handed Donald Trump a clear-cut return victory, the Democratic Party has yet to issued its postmortem analysis. However, recently, an influential liberal advocacy organization released its own. The Harris campaign, its authors contended, did not resonate with key voter blocs because it did not focus enough on addressing basic economic anxieties. By prioritising the threat to democracy that Trumpist populism represented, progressives neglected the bread-and-butter issues that were foremost in many people’s minds.

A Warning for Europe

As the EU braces for a turbulent era of politics between now and the end of the decade, that is a lesson that must be fully understood in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. The White House, as its recently published national security strategy makes clear, is optimistic that “nationalist movements 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) top the polls, supported by significant segments of blue-collar voters. Yet among mainstream leaders and parties, it is hard to discern a strategy that is adequate to challenging times.

Era-Defining Problems and Expensive 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 building economies that are less vulnerable to bullying by Mr Trump and China. As per a European research institute, the new age of global instability could necessitate an additional €250bn in annual EU defence spending. A significant report last year on European economic competitiveness demanded massive investment in shared infrastructure, to be financed in part by collective EU debt.

Such a economic transformation would boost growth figures that have stagnated 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 “budget hawks resist the idea of collective borrowing, and Brussels’ budget proposals for the next seven years are profoundly unambitious. In France, the idea of a wealth tax is overwhelmingly popular with voters. But the embattled centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Cost of Inaction

The truth 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. Acrimonious recent conflicts 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 eagerly leveraged to promote a politics of nativist social policy. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has resisted moves to raise the retirement age and has said that it would focus any benefit cuts at foreign residents.

Preventing a Strategic Advantage for Populists

In the US, Mr Trump’s pledges to protect working-class interests were largely insincere, as subsequent healthcare reductions and fiscal benefits for the wealthy underlined. But in the absence of a compelling progressive counteroffer from the Harris campaign, they worked on the election circuit. Without a radical shift in economic approach, societal agreements across the continent are in danger of being ripped up. Policymakers must steer clear of giving this electoral boon to the populist movements already on the rise in Europe.