Democracy should mean that ultimately the people hold power, yet in most European capitals, reality tells a very different story. The political narratives which European elites use to legitimize their rule has begun to slip.
To understand the moribund state of European politics today, it must be placed in contrast with the twentieth century origins of new democratic governance. This journey began 93 years ago in the United States under the watch of the Democratic Party’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign reveals a familiar pattern: “Believing that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party when entrusted with power, and that the people are entitled to know in plain words the terms of the contract to which they are asked to subscribe, we hereby declare this to be the platform of the Democratic Party.”
Such a promise sounds very democratic, especially if we understand that the people must be called through the political leadership of the party. Under this platform, FDR defeated President Herbert Hoover in a landslide, taking 472 of 531 votes in the electoral college. The liberal narrative of democracy ushered in during Roosevelt’s political revolution has come to underpin politics in the United States, and subsequently resonated throughout the European continent.
And yet, while European elites’ fidelity to this liberal narrative has remained, they appear to have lost control entirely.
In elections across the continent, European voters are demanding the parties of the New Right form government, and have in many cases come to detest the liberal values of the status quo. In countries, such as Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, conservative parties have even entered into coalition agreements with the establishment, reflecting the salience of European voters’ support for political change. Furthermore, political polling in Britain and Germany indicate the populist Reform and Alternative für Deutschland parties hold the majority of voter support.
Put simply, populists have genuinely become the people’s parties, and European elites’ attacks against them have only undermined the legitimacy of the liberal order they wish to preserve. As the Vice President of the United States said at the Munich Security Conference: the threat to European democracy lies within. In the past year and a half, several alarming news stories across Europe have illustrated this very fact.
In 2024 it was revealed that EU-funded NGOs rallied the European Parliament against the so-called “far-right,” and urged MEPs to avoid collaboration with such parties. In essence, taxpayer money has been used to fund bureaucrats’ pet projects to diminish the voices of concerned European citizens in Brussels. The extremity of European elites’ detest for populist is further illustrated by former European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who said on French television that if Germany’s AfD won the 2025 election, “they could also be annulled by the European Union, as was done in Romania.”
Meanwhile, post-Brexit Britain has implemented worrying restrictions against freedom of speech in the country. New data shows that 30 people every day are arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons. Even “thought crime,” as if it were taken straight from Orwell’s 1984, has become a reality as Britons can now be arrested for silently praying even in their own homes.
But this terrifying authoritarian trend is not isolated to the United Kingdom.
Despite being the largest party in the country, the AfD was subject to an investigation by German intelligence. Consequently, the state has designated the most popular party as “right-wing extremists”—whatever that even means. As a result of this investigation, it is now legal for domestic intelligence agencies to use surveillance and hire informants to monitor the party. Yet some German politicians feel this is not far enough, and that the party must be banned entirely.
In France, the home of Europe’s disgraced centrist darling Emmanuel Macron, the most likely candidate to win the 2027 presidential election—Marine Le Pen—has been banned from participating in the election. Ostensibly, Le Pen was barred from campaigning because her party, Rassemblement Nationale, violated EU administrative laws, yet no other party or figure has faced this same treatment for conducting precisely the same regulatory breaches. Rassemblement Nationale officials claimed that over the summer since the controversial ruling against their party leader, they were harassed by police at their party headquarters over suspicions of further violations.
While these are certainly the most high-profile examples, there is an endless list of cases where European governments have abandoned their democratic principles for the sake of political convenience. It is increasingly clear that the democratic, liberal values European countries so proudly evangelize to the rest of the world resemble nothing but a Potemkin village. They may say they are “defending democracy” but European elites in practice are merely defending their grip on power and sabotaging public aspirations for political accountability.
However, the ideological constructs which legitimise liberal elites’ discrimination against the European Right are nothing new.
Its origins can be traced to the term Streitbare Demokratie, meaning “militant democracy.” Coined in post-war Germany, the term justified the use of asymmetric legal tools such as bans, party surveillance, and restrictions against “extreme speech” to prevent the resurgence of National Socialism. Later, this principle was expanded to the rest of Europe, and weaponised as a tool to punish populist movements continent-wide.
Traces of the logic behind Streitbare Demokratie appear in the works of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Haberman, a member of the Frankfurt School, argued that Germany—and indeed all European nations—must distance themselves from narrow nationalism or patriotic fervor. Alongside the ideas promoted by Habermas stood Jean Monnet. Monnet, one of the pioneers behind the European project, championed what he called “fédéralisme fonctionnel” and the use of supranational institutions as a cure to divisive nationalism. Consciously, the European Commission took up the baton of these ideas in its 2001 white paper on European governance.
Ultimately, all trends in European politics are downstream from the United States. For the average American, the perverse strategies of liberal elites are nothing new, President Trump is to this day relentlessly attacked by establishment media, and most egregiously, was actively obstructed by the “swamp” in Washington during his first term in office. Before his triumphant victory in the 2024 presidential race, President Trump was almost certainly one of the most persecuted political figures in Western history.
So if the United States is any indication of Europe’s future, what should we expect?
In America, the liberals are collapsing, as their narrative has been thoroughly discredited by their actions—they no longer hold support because people believe that they are insincere. Furthermore with haemorrhaging public support, liberal elites no longer have a cohesive narrative, let alone a recipient base, to promote their beliefs. Establishment politicians remain beholden to their values to legitimize their manner of governance, neglecting entirely the fact that these values are held in common with an ever shrinking portion of society.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination: “I propose to you, my friends, and through you to all Americans, that government of all kinds, big and little, be made solvent, and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his cabinet.”
Let us hope for a similar evolution across European nations, where political legitimacy is restored through genuine accountability to the people. In the meantime, the political parties of the European New Right must dedicate themselves every day to earn the trust and support of voters, working tirelessly to make our continent great again.
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