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Over a year following the election that handed Donald Trump a clear-cut comeback victory, the Democratic Party has still not issued its postmortem analysis. But, recently, an influential liberal advocacy organization released its own. The Harris campaign, its writers contended, did not resonate with core constituencies because it failed to concentrate enough on addressing everyday financial worries. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, progressives overlooked the kitchen-table concerns that were foremost in many people’s minds.

A Warning for Europe

As the EU braces for a tumultuous period of politics between now and the end of the decade, that is a lesson that needs to be fully understood in European capitals. The White House, as its newly released national security strategy makes clear, is hopeful that “patriotic” parties in Europe will quickly 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, backed by large swaths of blue-collar voters. But among establishment politicians and parties, it is hard to discern a strategy that is sufficient to troubling times.

Era-Defining Challenges and Costly Solutions

The issues Europe faces are expensive and era-defining. They include the war in Ukraine, maintaining the momentum of the green transition, addressing demographic change and building economies that are more resilient 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 major report last year on European economic competitiveness called for massive investment in public goods, to be financed in part by collective EU debt.

Such a economic transformation would stimulate growth figures that have flatlined for years.

However, at both the pan-European and national levels, there remains a deficit of courage when it comes to generating funds. The EU’s so-called “frugal” nations oppose the idea of shared debt, and Brussels’ budget proposals 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 embattled centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Cost of Inaction

The reality is that in the absence of such measures, the less well-off will pay the price of financial adjustment through austerity budgets and greater inequality. Acrimonious recent conflicts over retirement reforms in both France and Germany testify to a growing battle over the future of the European welfare state – a trend that the RN and the AfD have happily exploited to promote a politics of welfare chauvinism. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has resisted moves to raise the retirement age and has said that it would focus any benefit cuts at foreign residents.

Avoiding a Political Gift for Nationalists

In the US, Mr Trump’s pledges to protect working-class interests were largely insincere, as later Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy demonstrated. But without a compelling progressive alternative from the Harris campaign, they worked on the election circuit. Absent a radical shift in economic approach, societal agreements across the continent are in danger of being torn apart. Governments must avoid handing this electoral boon to the populist movements already on the march in Europe.