A profound sense of economic gloom across Europe is creating fertile ground for a sustained rise in far-right, authoritarian politics, a leading commentator has warned. The analysis comes as figures like Jordan Bardella, president of France's Rassemblement National, continue to build support, evidenced by events like his book signing in Hauts-de-France on 6 December 2025.
The Zero-Sum Narrative and the Migrant Scapegoat
Since the financial crash of 2008, the public across Western nations has been fed a corrosive narrative, argues columnist Owen Jones. People are encouraged to believe they are trapped in a zero-sum competition for ever-dwindling resources. The far-right's message capitalises on this directly: if there isn't enough to go around, why are "our" scarce resources being given to migrants? Their solution is brutally simple – remove this "undeserving" competition and the native population will prosper once more.
This argument persists despite evidence to the contrary. Data shows that, on average, migrants are net contributors to European economies. For instance, between 2014 and 2018, migrants contributed approximately €1,500 more per capita than European-born citizens. In Germany, the labour force would shrink without migrant workers, deepening the country's economic troubles.
Mainstream Complicity and Economic Failure
The potency of this scapegoating is amplified when mainstream politicians, responding to far-right advances, adopt similar rhetoric and demonise migrants. This is often bolstered by inflammatory media coverage. The underlying economic pain provides rich fodder for demagogues, especially when people are told no alternative exists to the neoliberal model that caused the crisis.
After the Cold War, alternatives to deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a shrunken state were declared extinct. Following the 2008 crash, German-led austerity crippled economies across the eurozone. When Greece's Syriza government rebelled, it was crushed as a warning to others. Now, in France, President Macron tells citizens they must work longer, while the National Rally promises to "reserve social assistance for French citizens." In Britain, debates over pensioner benefits versus migrant support give figures like Nigel Farage a powerful platform.
A Continent Soaked in Pessimism
The economic model is failing its people. Germany, once a critic of others' profligacy, pursued wage suppression and chronic underinvestment. Combined with the shock of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, growth has evaporated, living standards are strained, and the far-right AfD is surging with its message of prioritising "natives."
The result is a continent soaked in pessimism. Nearly two-thirds of German consumers feel negative about the national economic situation. Faith in democracy is collapsing as elites fail to deliver improvements; only a quarter of British voters are satisfied with how democracy works, and in France, it's fewer than one in five.
The Stark Choice: New Model or Lost Democracy
The reality, however, is that scarcity is a political choice, not a law of nature. The EU's nearly 500 billionaires control €2.3 trillion in wealth, their fortunes growing by over €2 billion a day in the first half of this year. Wealth is being siphoned from workers to a tiny elite. When this is treated as inevitable, people understandably turn on each other.
The stigma once attached to the far right has evaporated. The idea of a cordon sanitaire is incinerated. The comforting belief that Western democratic institutions are an automatic bulwark against authoritarianism is false, as shown by Hungary's descent and Trump's America. With Donald Trump back in the White House and his National Security Strategy vowing to "cultivate resistance" in Europe against "civilisational erasure," the external pressure has intensified.
The warning is explicit: either Europe ends an economic model that condemns millions to insecurity and stagnation, or it risks losing democracy itself. The failure to heed this warning, Jones concludes, may leave future generations to regret the consequences profoundly.
