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Over a year after the election 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 contended, failed to connect with core constituencies because it failed to concentrate enough on tackling basic economic anxieties. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Trumpist populism represented, progressives overlooked the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds.

A Warning for Europe

While Europe prepares for a tumultuous period of politics from now until the end of the decade, that is a message that needs to be fully understood in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. The White House, as its recently published national security strategy indicates, is hopeful that “patriotic” parties in Europe will quickly mirror Mr Trump’s success. Within Europe'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 strategy that is adequate to troubling times.

Major Problems and Expensive Solutions

The challenges Europe faces are expensive and era-defining. They include the war in Ukraine, sustaining the momentum of the green transition, dealing with demographic change and building economies that are less vulnerable to bullying by Mr Trump and China. According to a European thinktank, the new age of global instability could necessitate an additional €250bn in yearly EU defence spending. A significant study last year on European economic competitiveness called for massive investment in public goods, to be partly funded by jointly held EU debt.

Such a fiscal paradigm shift would boost growth figures that have flatlined for years.

However, at both the EU-wide and national levels, there continues to be a lack of boldness when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “frugal” nations resist the idea of shared debt, and EU spending plans for the next seven years are profoundly unambitious. In France, the idea of a tax on the super-rich is overwhelmingly popular with voters. But the beleaguered centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Price of Political Paralysis

The truth is that in the absence of such measures, the less well-off will bear the brunt of fiscal tightening through spending cuts and greater inequality. Acrimonious recent conflicts over retirement reforms in both France and Germany highlight a developing struggle over the future of the European welfare state – a phenomenon 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 target any benefit cuts at foreign residents.

Avoiding a Political Gift for Populists

Across the Atlantic, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were deeply disingenuous, as subsequent Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy demonstrated. Yet in the absence of a compelling progressive counteroffer from the Harris campaign, they worked on the campaign trail. Absent a fundamental change in fiscal policy, 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.