Last Sunday was supposed to settle the question of whether Europe’s populist right can govern, and instead it sharpened a different one: Whether the establishment can keep winning without solving anything. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally dominated the first round of municipal elections — finishing first in at least 75 communes, roughly seven times its 2020 number — only to be beaten back in the second-round runoffs by the familiar mechanism of the front républicain, losing Marseille by fifteen points, squandering a thirteen-point lead in Toulon, and watching Paris stay comfortably in Socialist hands for a twenty-sixth consecutive year. The French firewall held, for now.
In Germany, no such firewall exists in the architecture of the ballot, only in the minds of party leaders. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD more than doubled its vote share to 19.5 per cent — the party’s best result ever in a western German state — and among voters aged 18 to 24 it was the most popular party outright. Among manual workers, it reached 30 per cent; in some Westerwald constituencies it approached half of all votes cast. The SPD, which had governed the state for thirty-five unbroken years, lost nearly ten points and was displaced by the CDU. And yet, just as in France, the result will change nothing in the short term: All parties maintain the cordon sanitaire, a grand coalition will be formed, and the voters who chose the AfD will once again be governed by a coalition that exists primarily to exclude them.
The pattern across both countries is the same. The populist right keeps growing, yet the establishment keeps winning and the gap between electoral results and actual power keeps widening. The geography of this revolt is by now familiar. The National Rally dominates everywhere except the metropolitan cores. The same fault line runs through Britain, where the post-Brexit immigration surge – non-EU net migration reaching record highs under the very government that promised to “take back control” – has made a mockery of democratic consent. It runs through Germany, through the Netherlands, through Austria. As David Goodhart diagnosed it in The Road to Somewhere, the divide is between those whose identity is rooted in a place and those whose identity floats freely above it. The Somewheres are winning elections. The question is whether they know what to do with their victories.
For the uncomfortable truth is this: Removing the current elite is necessary but not sufficient. Even if every immigration hawk in Europe got everything they wanted tomorrow – net zero migration, full border control, mandatory integration – you would still be left with a civilisation that does not know what it is for. The revolt against mass immigration is real, justified, and long overdue. But immigration is a symptom. The disease is a crisis of meaning.
Consider the birth rate. Every European country has tried some version of pro-natalist policy: Tax credits, parental leave, childcare subsidies. None of it has worked, because the problem is not primarily economic. A society in which both partners must work full-time to afford a modest flat is not a society that encourages family formation. But even where the economics improve, the deeper issue remains. People do not have children because the government offers them a tax break. They have children because they believe the world they are bringing a child into is worth inhabiting – because they have a sense of purpose that extends beyond their own lifespan. This is what the technocrats cannot legislate into existence.
The same applies to work. Britain currently has 2.8 million people economically inactive due to long-term sickness – one of the highest rates in the G7, and a number that has been climbing since the pandemic. The expansion of what counts as “disability” has been a bipartisan project stretching back to the Blair era, when a generation of men in post-industrial towns were quietly shifted from the unemployment rolls onto incapacity benefit. The numbers looked better. The human cost was catastrophic. A man who has never held a job does not lack income. He lacks structure, purpose, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. No government transfer payment addresses this.
This is where the conventional Right fails. Libertarians offer deregulation and tax cuts, which are fine as far as they go but do not answer the question of meaning. The socialist alternative offers redistribution, which purchases material comfort at the price of dependency. What is needed is something one might call industrialism: A political economy that takes seriously the proposition that work is not merely a means of generating GDP but a source of human dignity. Pro-industry, pro-manufacturing, pro-energy. Not because a steel mill is the most efficient way to allocate capital – the economists will tell you it is not – but because a functioning industrial economy provides something no service-sector gig economy can: The experience of doing something tangible, difficult, and necessary.
As Vaclav Smil has been tirelessly documenting, modern civilisation rests on four material pillars – fertilisers, cement, plastic, and steel – all of which require energy-intensive industrial processes. The green movement’s war against these processes is not merely an economic miscalculation. It is an assault on the material foundations of the meaningful life. When you shut down a coal mine, you do not just eliminate jobs. You eliminate a community’s reason for existing. When you replace manufacturing with an app-based service economy, you do not just change the sectoral composition of GDP. You change what it means to live in that place.
The great irony of our moment is that the people who lecture most about “wellbeing” and “mental health” are the same people whose policies have systematically destroyed the conditions under which ordinary people could live well. Affordable housing, stable employment, recognisable communities, a country you feel is yours – these are not luxuries. They are the prerequisites of a life that makes sense. The point of an economy is not to maximise output. The point is to enable the kind of life people actually want to live. And if your income rises by £200 a month but you no longer recognise the city around you, you have not gained anything. You have lost what money was supposed to buy.
This is the challenge the insurgent parties have not yet answered. It is relatively easy – politically and rhetorically – to campaign against what you reject: Mass immigration, green ideology, technocratic overreach. It is much harder to articulate what you are for. If you succeed in stripping away the replacement ideologies – the climate absolutism, the gender theology, the multicultural catechism – what do you fill the vacuum with? The old answers (God, nation, duty) have not entirely disappeared, but they have been so thoroughly delegitimised by two generations of institutional capture that they cannot simply be reinstalled by decree.
The good news is that we are having conversations today that were impossible a decade ago. The bad news is that conversations are not yet a programme. The forming counter-elite still has a great deal of work to do. A revolt is not a civilisation. And a civilisation that knows only what it is against will not survive much longer than one that believes in nothing at all.
The Hormuz crisis is about much more than oil