The Revolution That Never Comes

Last Sunday was supposed to settle the question of whether Europe’s populist right can govern, and instead it sharpened a different one: Whether the establishment can keep winning without solving anything. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally dominated the first round of municipal elections — finishing first in at least 75 communes, roughly seven times its 2020 number — only to be beaten back in the second-round runoffs by the familiar mechanism of the front républicain, losing Marseille by fifteen points, squandering a thirteen-point lead in Toulon, and watching Paris stay comfortably in Socialist hands for a twenty-sixth consecutive year. The French firewall held, for now.

In Germany, no such firewall exists in the architecture of the ballot, only in the minds of party leaders. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD more than doubled its vote share to 19.5 per cent — the party’s best result ever in a western German state — and among voters aged 18 to 24 it was the most popular party outright. Among manual workers, it reached 30 per cent; in some Westerwald constituencies it approached half of all votes cast. The SPD, which had governed the state for thirty-five unbroken years, lost nearly ten points and was displaced by the CDU. And yet, just as in France, the result will change nothing in the short term: All parties maintain the cordon sanitaire, a grand coalition will be formed, and the voters who chose the AfD will once again be governed by a coalition that exists primarily to exclude them. 

The pattern across both countries is the same. The populist right keeps growing, yet the establishment keeps winning and the gap between electoral results and actual power keeps widening. The geography of this revolt is by now familiar. The National Rally dominates everywhere except the metropolitan cores. The same fault line runs through Britain, where the post-Brexit immigration surge – non-EU net migration reaching record highs under the very government that promised to “take back control” – has made a mockery of democratic consent. It runs through Germany, through the Netherlands, through Austria. As David Goodhart diagnosed it in The Road to Somewhere, the divide is between those whose identity is rooted in a place and those whose identity floats freely above it. The Somewheres are winning elections. The question is whether they know what to do with their victories.