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More than a year following the vote that handed Donald Trump a decisive return victory, the Democratic party has yet to released its election autopsy. However, last week, an prominent liberal advocacy organization published its own. Kamala Harris's campaign, its authors argued, failed to connect 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 overlooked the kitchen-table concerns that were uppermost in many people’s minds.

A Lesson for European Capitals

As the EU braces for a turbulent era of politics from now until the end of the decade, that is a message that needs to be fully absorbed in European capitals. The White House, as its newly released national security strategy makes clear, is hopeful that “patriotic” parties in Europe will soon replicate 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, supported by large swaths of working-class voters. But among establishment politicians and parties, it is difficult to see a response that is adequate to troubling times.

Era-Defining Problems and Expensive Solutions

The issues Europe faces are expensive and historic. 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 Brussels-based thinktank, the new age of global instability could necessitate an additional €250bn in annual EU defence spending. A significant study last year on European economic competitiveness called for substantial investment in shared infrastructure, to be partly funded by collective EU debt.

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

However, at both the EU-wide and national levels, there remains a lack of boldness when it comes to generating funds. The EU’s so-called “budget hawks resist the idea of collective borrowing, and EU spending plans for the next seven years are profoundly unambitious. In France, the idea of a tax on the super-rich is widely supported with voters. But the beleaguered centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Cost of Political Paralysis

The truth is that without such measures, the less well-off will bear the brunt of financial adjustment through spending cuts and greater inequality. Acrimonious recent disputes over retirement reforms in both France and Germany highlight a developing struggle over the future of the European social model – a phenomenon that the RN and the AfD have happily exploited to promote a politics of nativist social policy. 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.

Preventing a Strategic Advantage for Populists

In the US, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were deeply disingenuous, as later Medicaid cuts and fiscal benefits for the wealthy demonstrated. But in the absence of a convincing progressive alternative from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Absent a fundamental change in economic approach, societal agreements across the continent are in danger of being ripped up. Governments must steer clear of handing this electoral boon to the Trumpian forces already on the rise in Europe.