Better in their words…

Decades of mass migration, climatism, transgenderism and other unpopular policies are fueling European populism

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER JUN 21∙PAID

Britain’s government is collapsing, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s possible resignation tomorrow is likely just the beginning. Starmer was already in trouble before Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, wona by-election on Thursday that cleared his path to becoming Starmer’s replacement. Also damaging to Starmer were Labour defeats in May elections when the party lost more than 1,300 council seats while Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK party gained more than 1,350. Reform now leads national polls at around 27%, with Labour and the Conservatives tied at around 19%. Starmer’s net approval has fallen to roughly minus 44, among the worst ever recorded for a sitting prime minister at this stage. Many blame various scandals, such as Starmer’s appointmentof a friend of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as ambassador to Washington. But if Starmer and his agenda were popular, then voters and the press would not have made so much of such mistakes.

Across Europe, establishment parties are losing power to insurgents who reject their anti-Western agendas and values. Beatrix Von Storch, a member of the German parliament representing the libertarian conservative populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), told Public, “Regarding [the resignation of Starmer], it is a sign of the decline of the established parties, which are failing to solve the problems of the day. Keir Starmer is the first to resign under pressure from the new anti-migration movement in Western Europe. Soon [German Chancellor Friederich] Merz could follow.”

For the first time, national-populist parties lead the polls in Europe’s four largest economies. In Germany, the AfD leads national surveys at around 28%, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) polls first, and a November survey projected her deputy Jordan Bardella to win the 2027 presidential runoff against any opponent. In Austria, Herbert Kickl’s Freedom Party won the 2024 election with 29%, its strongest result since the Second World War. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni governs. France elects a president in April 2027, while Germany and Britain are not due to vote until 2029.

The “cordon sanitaire” or firewall by which mainstream parties refused to govern alongside the far right is rapidly weakening. At the European Parliament, the center-right has repeatedly passed measures on migration and climate with votes from the populist-right, thus eroding the firewall’s power. “There are already rumors that Merz will be replaced by his party,” Von Storch said, “after regional elections in September.”

The liberal establishment may yet cling to power. In March 2026, centrist and left alliances held Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. Slovenia’s liberals won reelection, and Italians rejected Meloni’s flagship judicial reforms. One analyst described the result as an “illiberal pendulum,” in which the right surges, falters, and lets the center recover. In Germany, the AfD holds no majority, and the other parties can still build coalitions to exclude it, which is what happened to the Netherlands’ right-wing populist Geert Wilders. In France, a court convicted Marine Le Pen of trumped-up charges and barred her from office for five years, a ruling she is appealing, and could do the same to Bardella. In Britain, because the opposition is split three ways, Labour could in theory retain power past 2029.

But the trajectory is unmistakable. The parties of mass migration, climatism, and gender ideology are losing their grip on the West. Whatever the result of any single election, establishment parties have lost command of the agenda. The issues that defined the post-Cold War liberal order — open borders, the climate transition, and expansive cultural progressivism — have become liabilities at the ballot box. Voters who once deferred to the establishment expert and media consensus now punish it. A survey across 28 countries found that 64 percent of respondents believed journalists “are purposely trying to mislead people.” Even where the insurgents fall short, they set the terms of debate. And so the momentum belongs to the challengers. “Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister,” wrote Trump today, “He failed badly on two very important subjects — IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!).”

And the globalist establishment is sometimes adopting its opponents’ language and positions, above all on migration. Under European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the European Union earlier this month made its hardest line turn on migration in decades, approving return hubs outside Europe, longer detention, and faster deportations. One lawmaker who negotiated the law declared, “The era of deportations has begun.” Von der Leyen herself pledged to dismantle smuggling networks and bankrupt their operators by every available means. Britain’s Home Office reported nearly 60,000 deportations since Labour took office. Though most were “voluntary returns,” and thus done without the government’s involvement, Starmer also tightened asylum restrictions, lengthening the path to citizenship from five to 20 years, ending automatic family reunification rights, and sought to reinterpret how the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is applied by British courts. In Germany, Merz deported 81 Afghans to Taliban-run Afghanistan and said he was “grateful” to deliver on his promises. After the 2025 Mulhouse stabbing attack, France threatened to tear up the 1968 pact that grants Algerians easier entry. The Netherlands and Austria have tightened their asylum rules as well. These are the same governments that, a decade ago, denounced such measures as xenophobic.

What changed? Why are Europeans turning away from the liberal establishment and toward the populist right?

Reality Intrudes

One explanation for the turn is technological. New media stripped the establishment of its monopoly on what the public is permitted to know. For decades, a handful of newspapers and broadcasters decided which facts reached ordinary people. Podcasts, independent journalists, and platforms like X, under the control of Elon Musk, broke that monopoly. Analysts dubbed2024 the first podcast election, as candidates bypassed the press to address audiences directly. More than 100 million Americans now listen to a podcast every week. After the vote, Elon Musk told his 220 million followers on X, “You are the media now.” Stories that the legacy press had minimized, such as migrant crime, the costs of “net zero” climate policies, and the harms of transgender surgeries, were finally allowed to spread when reported on by upstart new outlets, such as GB News in the UK and NIUS in Germany. Over time, the liberal establishment lost control of the narrative.

But technology is only part of the story. The deeper reason the public is turning is that the liberal establishment’s policies cause real harm, and many citizens and voters are starting to see that it has been attacking fundamental pillars of civilization, namely law and order in the case of mass migration, cheap energy and industrial civilization in the case of climatism, and the protection of children from predators in the case of transgenderism.

For example, the public turned against mass migration above all because of crimes by migrants that the authorities first enabled and then concealed. In Britain, the grooming-gang scandal became the defining case. For years, police and councils looked away as gangs sexually abused thousands of girls. Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit found that the perpetrators’ ethnicity had been “shied away from,” and that in the areas studied, a disproportionate share of suspects were men of Pakistani background. After resisting for months, Starmer announced a national statutory inquiry in June 2025. A national police operation has since flagged more than 1,200 closed cases for review, over 200 of them high-priority rapes.

On the continent, a string of attacks by asylum seekers hardened opinion. In Aschaffenburg, Germany, in January 2025, an Afghan asylum seeker who had been ordered to leave the country killed a man and a child. “The case caused a huge debate about the Brandmauer (fire wall) against the AfD in Germany,” said Pauline Voss of NIUS. Weeks later in Mulhouse, France, an Algerian whom France had, by the prime minister’s account, tried to deport 14 times, killed a passerby in what President Emanuel Macron called an “Islamist terrorist act.” Each case shared a pattern: the attacker should not have been in the country, and the system had failed to remove him. The establishment’s response was to police the public’s reaction rather than the crime itself.

On immigration, the publics of Europe’s three largest countries have turned hard against the status quo. In Britain, Ipsos found in February 2026 that 67% think the total number of people coming to the country is too high, with 61% saying immigration has hurt housing and 54% saying it has worsened crime. YouGov’s EuroTrack survey recorded the same mood across the Channel, with 71% of Britons, 69% of the French, and a full 81% of Germans saying that immigration over the past decade has been too high. The German rejection is now the firmest in Western Europe: a YouGov poll for the news agency DPA showed in December 2025 that 76% support reducing the number of asylum seekers, with 53% backing that goal outright. The French are scarcely softer, with a majority, 52%, also telling YouGov that immigration has been bad for the country.

The way British police treated Henry Nowak as he lay dying reveals how far the West had drifted from reality. On December 3, 2025, a 23-year-old man named Vickrum Digwa stabbed 18-year-old Henry Nowak five times on a street in Southampton. Digwa’s brother called 999 and falsely accused Nowak of racially abusing them. The officers who arrived believed the accusation and handcuffed the dying teenager as he told them he could not breathe, treating him as a suspect rather than a victim. A British court later convicted Digwa of murder and sentenced him to life with a minimum of 21 years.

The way the media covered the scandal further undermined its credibility. The New York Times framed the aftermath under the headline “In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots,” and noted that Nigel Farage had tied the killing to immigration, even though neither the victim nor the attacker was an immigrant. The detail the paper buried was the one that enraged the public: that police had treated a dying boy as a suspect because they feared being called racist. Vice President JD Vance wrote that Nowak “died the same way a civilization dies.”

Meanwhile, Europe’s Green Deal, which von der Leyen once called a “man on the moon moment,” became synonymous with expensive energy and deindustrialization. Brussels responded by quietly retreating, rolling back sustainability rules in a February 2025 omnibus law and postponing carbon pricing on transport and buildings. Many officials have stopped using the term Green Deal altogether. The revolt began between 2018 and 2020, when France’s Yellow Vests rose up against a fuel tax. In Germany, the AfD campaigned against what it called an “eco-dictatorship.” In Poland, Karol Nawrocki won the presidency in 2025 after promising a referendum on the Green Deal. An OECD report found that only a minority of citizens trusted their governments to deliver the transition at all. As with migration, the European media and political establishment blamed the public’s ignorance and “climate deniers” rather than the policies’ real-world impact on consumers and workers.

On climate, voters still endorse distant goals while rejecting the policies needed to reach them. In Britain, the Policy Institute at King’s College London and Ipsos reported in 2025 that support for low-traffic neighborhoods, flight taxes, electric-vehicle subsidies, and taxes on high-carbon food had all fallen, with opposition to several now outweighing support, and that just 44% would back a party committed to strong climate action if it raised costs, down from 52% a year earlier. A separate YouGov survey found outright majorities opposed to banning petrol and diesel cars, raising fuel duty, and capping how much meat and dairy people can buy. In Germany, the research alliance Ariadne found that fewer than 40% support measures such as the carbon price or a ban on new gas and oil boilers, the very heating law whose backlash helped break Olaf Scholz’s coalition, and which Friedrich Merz’s government is now scrapping. In France, the revolt is older but no less telling: the Yellow Vests rose against a green fuel tax, and an Oxford University survey ranked the ban on combustion-engine cars as the single least popular climate policy in France, Germany, and Poland.

The public has turned against gender ideology as alternative media and detransitioners exposed it as quackery. Finland in 2020 called youth gender transition experimental, and Sweden in 2022 concluded that the risks “likely outweigh the expected benefits.” Denmark and Norway moved in the same direction. Britain’s Cass Review, published in 2024, found weak evidence for the use of puberty blockers and hormones in minors. The government then banned puberty blockers for under-18s indefinitely. The battle is far from over. Two-thirds of EU countries still allow minors some access. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland reaffirmed it in 2025. Britain is moving forward with plans to allow more puberty blocker experiments. But the direction of travel is unmistakable.

In Britain, King’s College London and Ipsos found in 2025 that 39% now say trans rights have “gone too far,” more than double the share five years earlier, while the proportion saying they have not gone far enough fell from 31% to 17%. YouGov recorded 74% opposed to trans-identified males competing in women’s sports. After the Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that sex in equality law means biological sex, a YouGov poll for Sex Matters showed63% agreed with the judgment. Ipsos found that support for trans athletes competing by their chosen gender has dropped to 22% across 23 countries, from 32% in 2021, with opposition strongest in Britain.

That the Left’s anti-civilization policies caused real harm strikes at the establishment’s deepest source of authority, which is its claim to rational care. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues found that liberals build their morality mainly on two foundations, care and fairness. (Later researchers replicated the pattern while finding the effect smaller than first reported.) The establishment Left’s moral authority, therefore, rests overwhelmingly on the promise to prevent harm, and harm is precisely what its signature policies have produced.

Goliath Is Slow and Blind 

The bad news, for those who want change, is that the establishment will cling to power for years yet. The next elections are distant: France chooses a president in 2027, and Germany and Britain are not due to vote until 2029. Incumbents control the timing, the courts, and the rules of the game. Von der Leyen, Macron, and Merz are eager to censor social media now and even more before elections. And the establishment may be able to moderate just enough, on migration above all, to blunt the insurgents, while maintaining as well as it can the cordon sanitaire firewall.

But the establishment is unlikely to change enough or fast enough for the simple reason that Goliaths, like the establishment European governments, are blind and slow. “Changing the head of government will not change the situation,” said Von Storch about Starmer’s resignation. “People want a total shift in real politics, not only in personality and rhetoric. The time when people could be satisfied by words is over; people want action, and they want it now.”

Said NIUS’s Voss, “For a short period of time, it seemed like the CDU, the conservative party in Germany, was willing to change migration politics. But then the left parties, and state-funded NGOs, organized mass demonstrations and physical attacks on CDU offices, protesting any collaboration of CDU and AfD, and successfully intimidated the CDU conservatives.”

When the establishment media and politicians dismiss their opponents as racists, climate deniers, and transphobes, they fail to address the very real world concerns that voters will increasingly have about migrant crime, deindustrialization, and the sterilization of children. The establishment is unlikely to completely censor or block X, which, as the freest social media platform, is also the most disruptive to the globalist EU establishment, particularly now that its owner is, at least on paper, a trillionaire and the richest man in the world.

The anti-civilization Left will not vanish, but it will likely shrink to a committed minority. The Left’s hard core is smaller than it appears. In a major US survey, progressive activists made up just 8% of the population. The broader progressive bloc, perhaps a third of the electorate, is larger but far less committed. Over time, the public will connect the dots and see that, at the heart of its agenda and ideology, is hatred of civilization, stemming from decades of intolerant media and university programming attacking the West as the inventor of slavery and genocide.