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Over a twelve months following the vote that handed Donald Trump a decisive comeback victory, the Democratic Party has yet to issued its postmortem analysis. However, recently, an influential progressive lobby group published its own. The Harris campaign, its writers contended, did not resonate with key voter blocs because it did not focus enough on tackling basic economic anxieties. In focusing on the threat to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, liberals overlooked the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds.

A Lesson for Europe

As the EU braces for a tumultuous period of politics between now and the end of the decade, that is a message that needs to be fully understood in European capitals. The White House, as its newly released national security strategy indicates, is optimistic that “nationalist movements in Europe will soon replicate Mr Trump’s success. In the EU’s core nations, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) lead the polls, supported by large swaths of working-class voters. Yet among mainstream leaders and parties, it is difficult to see a strategy that is sufficient to troubling times.

Major Challenges and Expensive Solutions

The issues Europe faces are costly and era-defining. They encompass the war in Ukraine, maintaining the momentum of the green transition, dealing with demographic change and building economies that are less vulnerable to pressure by Mr Trump and China. According to 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 demanded massive investment in shared infrastructure, to be financed in part by jointly held EU debt.

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

But, at both the EU-wide and national levels, there continues to be a deficit of courage when it comes to revenue raising. The EU’s so-called “budget hawks resist 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. Yet the embattled centrist government – though desperate to cut its budget deficit – refuses to contemplate such a move.

The Price of Inaction

The reality is that without such measures, the less well-off will pay the price of fiscal tightening through spending cuts and greater inequality. Acrimonious recent disputes over pension cutbacks in both France and Germany highlight a developing struggle over the future of the European social model – a phenomenon that the RN and the AfD have eagerly leveraged to promote a politics of welfare chauvinism. Ms Le Pen’s party, for example, has opposed moves to raise the retirement age and has said that it would target any benefit cuts at non-French nationals.

Preventing a Strategic Advantage for Populists

In the US, Mr Trump’s promises to protect working-class interests were deeply disingenuous, as later Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy underlined. Yet without a convincing progressive counteroffer from the Harris campaign, they worked on the election circuit. Without a fundamental change in economic approach, social contracts across the continent risk being torn apart. Policymakers must steer clear of giving this electoral boon to the Trumpian forces already on the rise in Europe.