Things are terrible in Europe, and they’re only going to get worse

NEW DELHI: Early this year, France’s center-right Republicans decided to move to a new home. After a decade of demoralizing defeats, the party vacated its headquarters for one closer to France’s National Assembly, hoping the move would bring a change in fortune.

It was not to be. June brought disastrous results in European Parliament elections and the prospect of more in a snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron. In response, the president of the Republicans, Éric Ciotti, threw in his lot with the ascendant National Rally, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen. But he did so without consulting the party’s other leaders, to whom the alliance remained anathema. When they tried to remove him from his post, Mr. Ciotti simply dismissed the staff and locked the doors.

Mr. Ciotti’s lockout is emblematic of the season of political chaos Europeans have lived through this past year. Such collapses and reversals have now become the norm. Within three months of taking office, the French government that was painstakingly put together after the election fell apart; the German government soon followed suit. As 2024 draws to a close, the European Union’s founding duo find themselves politically adrift.

Europe’s growing far right, meanwhile, has only entrenched its position. This summer’s European elections were marked by breakout performances for the hard right across the union, and there were major advances on the national level, too. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom forged a government coalition; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s post-fascist prime minister, saw her popularity deepen; and the far-right Alternative for Germany surged to become the country’s second-most-popular party.

Europe’s extreme right has moved past the point of normalization — now a regular force of government, it is becoming almost banal. For Europe, its consolidation caps a year of tumult. Judging from the continent’s parlous economic situation and general social disarray, matters are only going to get worse.

A decade ago, Europe presented a very different face to the world. In Greece, the radical left party Syriza was about to rise to power on the back of resistance to austerity imposed by the so-called Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. In France, a center-left president, François Hollande, was being hounded by rebels on the left of his party. And in Britain, a socialist backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn was soon to claim the leadership of the Labour Party.

All of this reads like ancient history today. Syriza, which ultimately carried out the austerity it had campaigned against, lost power in 2019 and splintered after a former Goldman Sachs trader was elected as its leader. Mr. Corbyn has been kicked out of the party he once led, and the French left has been sidelined by Mr. Macron’s penchant for cutting deals with the right. Die Linke, once a credible challenger to the Greens and Social Democrats for leadership on the German left, risks disappearing from Parliament in the country’s upcoming elections.

This decline is not the result of a political law of nature. Instead, Europe’s current political constellation owes much to a cohort of politicians and officials who held sway in the 2010s across the continent. Following Angela Merkel’s lead during her 16-year stint as Germany’s chancellor, it was they who set the terms of European politics that have now come back to haunt policymakers. Their response, for instance, to the “euro crisis” — the seemingly never-ending financial troubles that followed the crash of 2008 — was to offer a damaging blend of moralism and technocracy.

Doubling down on punitive austerity measures, Jeroen Dijsselbloem — Ms. Merkel’s lieutenant as head of an informal grouping of Eurozone finance ministers — claimed that the debt-ridden governments of Southern Europe had wasted their money on “schnapps and women.” For his part, Jean-Claude Juncker, then chief of the European Commission, admonished Greeks that there was “no need to commit suicide because you are afraid of dying.” Led by Ms. Merkel, Europe’s politicians insisted on obeisance to financial markets and European etiquette, no matter the consequences.

Today, the costs of this aggressive aversion to change have become starkly apparent. In the past decade and a half, continental growth indicators have gone from stagnant to concerning. In a recent X-ray of the European economy, Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank and former prime minister of Italy, sounded a belated alarm as to the grim extent of the decline: lack of innovation, lagging productivity and general economic underperformance. The continent’s economic future looks impossibly bleak.

The wallop has been a long time coming. Occupied with disciplining Europe’s periphery, policymakers in Berlin missed a reckoning with Germany’s economic model. A book published this year by the German commentator Wolfgang Münchau required no more than two syllables to sum up the results of this procrastination: “Kaput.” Mr. Münchau’s list of causes for the downturn are familiar: the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which together spurred a global price fever and cut off the usual source of energy on which German factories ran — an inflationary spiral compounded by America’s trade wars. For an economy coasting by, these shocks proved worse than destabilizing.

Germany’s prized export sector especially suffered from such complacency. For years, reports of an impending green revolution in electric vehicle production were dismissed. Now an industrial doomsday is dawning: Germany’s car producers have seen themselves priced out of their trusty Chinese markets, steadily served by Chinese producers. As catastrophic growth forecasts told a story of their own in October, Volkswagen announced it was closing factories in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history, with severe knock-on effects for neighboring economies in Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands.

Economically, the Merkel consensus sowed the seeds of stagnation. Politically, it wound up destroying dissidence to its left while allowing discontent on the right to thrive. As inflation pushes the cost of living skyward and real wages stagnate, European electorates have been left with the sense that the levers of policy are slipping from their grasp. Railing against immigration — long a source of ire for many across the Western world — and engaging in Americanized culture wars at least allow a cathartic release and the illusion of control.

In this environment, far-right forces have predictably prospered, alternately tolerated and co-opted by the political center. In seven out of 27 countries in the European Union, from Finland to Italy, the far right now directly participates in government. In the newly assembled European Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen, a key ally of Ms. Meloni holds an important vice-presidential position. Rather than the bloc fending off the far right, the prospect seems to be a far-right European Union, in which the mainstream chases the extremes.

To some outsiders this might give off an image of strength. Where foreign policy, military affairs or energy independence are concerned, however, Europe appears more and more rudderless in a stormy world. For a continent that once saw itself as a middle way between the unbridled market capitalism of the United States and the various authoritarians stationed farther east, it’s a bitter irony that it now seems headed for pale imitations of both. And with Donald Trump around the corner, the hard times may have only just begun.