For years, New York cyclists contended with a dangerous drop at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge bike lane. Known to rattled bicycle commuters as “The Bump”, it appeared immune to repeated calls for repair until New York mayor Zohran Mamdani personally joined a city crew filling the hole and smoothing a new ramp on January 6, 2026, in his first week in office.
Cyclists commuting into Manhattan tend to be more affluent than other New Yorkers and thus not as personally receptive to Mamdani’s plans for government grocery stores and free bus travel. But because he solved one small issue bedevilling them, Mamdani has firmed the allegiance of these voters.
Political consultants call it pothole populism: If you attend to the immediate problems upsetting the electorate, you can carry voters along with an extended political programme they may not wholly endorse.
Europe is about to discover the obverse side of pothole populism. If centrist parties continue to ignore the immediate sources of voter discontent, they open the door for a larger political programme that appals them. The pothole in this case is immigration.
Voters across Europe are angered by the failure of ruling parties to address the dramatic changes imposed on their communities by migrants from radically different and even hostile cultures. Startling increases in violent crime, sexual assault and demands for public deference to imported religious customs have caused many voters to abandon centrists for parties promising to address this gaping political pothole.
Many want nothing more than what they had a decade ago: Cities where their daughters could walk home safely at night, and social welfare for deserving taxpayers.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) propose to fill this pothole with draconian restrictions on immigration, strict requirements for assimilation, curtailed public benefits for migrants, and finally, mass deportations of failed asylum seekers, criminals and any migrants failing to integrate into their national cultures.
Voters in both countries appear increasingly willing to give these once-fringe parties a chance at governing, if only because their leaders don’t dismiss their concerns as crass bigotry.
The risk to the centrist consensus is not that these parties will drive major immigration reforms: The June 17, 2026 vote in the European Parliament in favour of expedited deportations, carried by 418 votes to 218, suggests that more restrictive policies are coming.
The real hazard to the elite consensus guiding the European project is the other policies that the anti-migrant parties will bring in their wake should they ride immigration to electoral victory. Both Germany’s AfD and Le Pen’s National Rally take a rather congenial stance towards Russian behaviour in general and Vladimir Putin in particular.
They see no good reason to sacrifice cheap energy and industrial competitiveness for Ukraine’s maximalist territorial demands. The EU’s fragile consensus in support of Kyiv for “… as long as it takes” could crumble if a President Le Pen blocks further aid for Ukraine.
With it will go the EU’s claim as a capable foreign policy agent equal to other great powers. Which is fine with Le Pen, who would rather embody de Gaulle’s vision of French grandeur unimpeded by interference from Brussels apparatchiks.
Europe’s pothole populists also propose to reverse both the EU’s decades-long commitment to neoliberal reforms and global free trade. Marine Le Pen despises EU rules that forestall the creation of European industrial champions capable of competing with Chinese and American firms.
In her view, EU competition rules are obsolete in a world now governed by neo-mercantilism. The massive State support showered on favoured exporters by the Chinese Government beggars a Europe afraid to respond with equally aggressive industrial policies.
The AfD blames mass layoffs in the automobile sector on high energy costs and excessive environmental rules imposed by the EU. A rapprochement with Putin and the abolition of net zero mandates would reverse two of the EU’s signature achievements and disembowel its pretence of leading a rule-based international order fuelled by new green industries.
How might centrist parties take potholes away from the populists? Denmark’s Social Democrat Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen offers a useful example.
She has imposed harsh restrictions on migration, including limits on family reunification, strict standards for asylum applicants and the seizure of valuables from migrants arriving in the country. As a result, migration to Denmark has fallen to a historic low, with 839 asylum residence permits granted in the first 11 months of 2025 against almost 11,000 in 2015, according to the Danish Immigration Service. Support for the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party collapsed to 2.6 per cent at the 2022 general election.
In stark contrast to German Social Democrats, who couch support for migration in terms of compassion and international law, Frederiksen opposes migration as a direct threat to Denmark’s treasured social welfare state.
As voters across Europe can easily see, the vast sums devoted to the care and feeding of migrants are money unavailable to pay for the health care and pensions of citizens. Given the choice, they’d rather their government spend their tax revenues on them than on recent arrivals. Frederiksen grasps a clear voter preference that remains mysteriously elusive to her fellow social democrats across Europe.
EU policy elites are fond of citing migration as a solution to Europe’s looming demographic disaster. In their view, a dependency ratio that Eurostat projects will fall in many countries to two workers per retiree or less by 2050 can only be remedied through the importation of millions.
Yet average voters walking the streets of European cities can easily see that many of these newcomers aren’t gainfully employed, aren’t paying taxes, and aren’t counting toward the number of workers supporting each dependent. They are often dependents themselves, subsisting on State aid, including housing support, free health care and monthly cash handouts.
Migrants eager to exploit welfare programmes and disinclined to work in secular communities alongside women and gays only exacerbate the declining dependency ratio.
Filling the immigration pothole would be easy for centrist parties less taken with performative empathy and more attuned to the demands of their restive constituents. Show your citizens that immigration serves their interests by admitting only those with the technical skills and qualifications needed to contribute to the general welfare and tax base while rejecting or deporting the rest, and the case for immigration becomes self-evident.
Condoning the crime and urban disorder brought by unsuitable migrants is wrecking the political standing of centrist parties. New parties eager to exploit migration as a path to power will bring additional policies that threaten the legitimacy of the entire European project.
Which is clearly their intent, so why are centrists giving them such an obvious political opening? The world wonders.
