Europe’s Reckoning: Dare More Democracy, or Watch the Reactionaries Win

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Monday 23rd March 2026

In the tapas bars of Madrid and the windswept plains of Extremadura, a quiet capitulation is underway. Spain’s Popular Party, once a stolid bastion of post-Franco conservatism, now finds itself propped up by Vox coalitions in region after region. Vox, the outfit that once lurked on the fringes, has doubled its seats in recent ballots and is scooping up nearly 40 per cent of young Spanish men,  not because they are all frothing ideologues, but because housing is a joke, wages have stagnated and the cost of living bites harder than any Brussels directive. 

Migration barely registers as their top gripe; it’s the bread-and-butter failures of the old order. As Gillian Tett might observe with her anthropologist’s eye, this is no abstract “populist wave”; it is the cultural fallout of a system that promised opportunity and delivered precarity. Private Eye would file it under “Vox Populi: Now With Extra Xenophobia and a Side of Rent Control That Never Came”.

The pattern is depressingly familiar. Across Europe, traditionally democratic right-wing parties,  the ones that once spoke of social cohesion, regulated immigration with a human face, safety nets and a world less scarred by hunger or war,  are borrowing the language of their more radical rivals. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s long rule has become the cautionary tale: media squeezed, judiciary questioned, funds from Brussels frozen over rule-of-law rows, all while he positions himself as the strongman defender of sovereignty. It is not quite the jackboot of the 1930s, but it is a warning that when economic anxiety meets elite disconnect, democracy frays. Yet the centrists offering an alternative,  Ursula von der Leyen with her technocratic pacts, Mark Rutte’s pragmatic NATOism, Friedrich Merz’s buttoned-up conservatism,  inspire about as much hope as a rainy weekend in Strasbourg. They manage decline; they do not ignite aspiration.

This is where Alex Callinicos’s sharp Marxist lens cuts through the fog. The far-right surge is not some mysterious virus of the soul; it is the predictable offspring of neoliberal Europe’s own contradictions: austerity that hollowed out communities, globalisation that left the young renting forever, and a green transition that sometimes felt like lectures from Davos rather than jobs in the regions. Traditional conservatives, terrified of losing their base, are normalising the rhetoric of expulsion and identity as if the lessons of the last century had never been learned. The result? A continent where fraternity feels like a quaint Eurovision lyric.

So what is to be done? The answer lies not in panic or purges, but in the words of the great Europeans who built this project from the ashes of war. Let us start with Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the founding spirits. “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan,” declared Schuman in 1950. “It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Monnet echoed the sentiment: “We do not unite states; we unite people.” Their vision was never a bureaucratic superstate crushing national feeling; it was practical solidarity: coal and steel first, then prosperity, peace, and a social floor beneath it all.

Willy Brandt, that towering social democrat who knew both exile and power, gave us the rallying cry we need today: “We want to dare more democracy.” In his 1969 declaration, he spoke of expanding civil rights, lifting the veil on power and giving every citizen a real stake. “What belongs together will grow together,” he later said of a reuniting Europe. That spirit ,  participatory, bold, rooted in social justice ,  is the antidote. Not the defensive crouch of the current centre-right, but a renewed commitment to the welfare safety net, to EU-wide investment in affordable housing and green jobs that actually employ the disaffected young, to wages that keep pace with rents. Dare more democracy means citizen assemblies on migration policy, not top-down pacts that leave voters feeling unheard; it means regulated borders that are firm yet humane, because pretending the issue does not exist only feeds the extremes.

Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher of post-war Germany, offered the deeper intellectual scaffolding: “constitutional patriotism”. Europeans do not need shared blood or ancient myths to cohere; we need loyalty to the universal principles of liberty, justice and human rights enshrined in our treaties. In an age of identity politics, this is radical medicine,  a patriotism of the Enlightenment, not the ethno-state. It demands we defend the rule of law not as an elite club but as the common inheritance that protects the vulnerable from both populist strongmen and technocratic overreach.

Even Winston Churchill, that improbable prophet of integration, saw the prize clearly in Zurich in 1946: “We must build a kind of United States of Europe… In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.” He understood that division makes us weak; unity, wisely built, restores strength and dignity.

And to those tempted by the siren calls of reaction, let Václav Havel,  survivor of totalitarianism and champion of truth,  remind us: “Truth and love must overcome lies and hatred.” Combat the propaganda machines with transparent public media, digital literacy in schools and an unapologetic defence of facts over grievance theatre. Hannah Arendt warned of the “banality of evil” and the totalitarian mind that no longer distinguishes between fact and fiction; we answer not with censorship but with relentless democratic argument.

Robert Kennedy, that American voice with a European soul, would have understood the moral urgency. He spoke of “the future does not belong to the fainthearted” and called us to make “gentle the life of this world”. Europe, that cradle of both horror and hope, can still choose fraternity over fracture. The EU, that is us, citizens as much as institutions, must act: a new social charter with teeth; targeted investment to slay the housing beast; honest debate on immigration that neither denies pressures nor descends into scapegoating; deeper integration that delivers for people, not just markets.

The alternative is the slow erosion Simon Jenkins has so often skewered ,  a Europe of resentful nation-states, each smaller than the sum of its fears. We have the tools: the founders’ blueprint, Brandt’s daring, Habermas’s principles. What we lack is the will to use them before the reactionaries claim the future by default.

The choice is ours. Let us choose solidarity. Let us dare more democracy. Let Europe, once again, arise,  not in fear, but in hope.