PARIS — Europe faces the new year amid a grim pileup of threats, its voters angry, its traditional political parties fragmented, its major economies stagnant or sluggish, its birth rates plummeting, and its eastern flank engulfed by a calamitous war.
The continent’s liberal democracies are under severe strain, not least from populist right-wing movements.
Seven of the European Union’s 27 member states are now governed fully or in part by extreme parties. More might follow as frustration mounts, especially among 20-something voters, at governments’ failure to limit immigration and promote jobs, housing and better living standards.
“There’s a disenchantment and a crisis of trust in this young generation who believe it’s not such an important thing to live in a democratic system” so long as “the government delivers public services, a nice economy and low energy prices,” Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, acting president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank, recently told reporters.
Germany and France, on whose muscle the continent has long relied to exert its will and chart its direction, appear for now to be all but ungovernable, their center-left and center-right parties discredited.
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In both countries, the symptoms of civic ill health are multiplying. France got its fourth new prime minister of 2024 a few weeks ago; many believed he might not last as long as his predecessor given the nation’s fractured Parliament.
In Germany, the fertility rate for 2023 was reported to have tumbled below 1.4 children per woman, the threshold considered “ultra-low” by the United Nations. A grim milestone, no doubt, but less shocking than the free-falling birth rates in Spain or Italy.
There is widespread worry that Europe is approaching a brink where the past’s comforting assumptions — about social stability, generous welfare benefits and broad prosperity — are fraying fast.
That sense is deepened as Russia’s predatory threat drives up defense spending, squeezes public finances and poses dire choices.
To modernize atrophied militaries and satisfy President-elect Donald Trump’s demand that the continent shoulder more of the burden of deterring Russia, European leaders will need to rely on growth that doesn’t exist, higher taxes in already-overtaxed countries or cannibalizing social programs, which would spell political suicide.
Not since the Cold War has Europe faced such a menacing security environment. Alarm bells are ringing nearly everywhere – not only because of Moscow’s intensifying hybrid war of sabotage, propaganda and election interference across the continent, but also because Washington’s postwar promise of protection looks flimsier than ever as Trump prepares to return to the White House.
Sweden’s government, so frightened of Russia that it ditched two centuries of neutrality to join NATO last year, recently mailed out a booklet, “In Case of Crisis or War,” meant to help Swedes prepare for the worst. Norway and Finland have issued similar instructions.
“Terrorism, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns are being used to undermine and influence us,” warns the Swedish government pamphlet, mailed to every household in the land. “To resist these threats, we must stand united.”
Elsewhere in the north, the Baltic republics — NATO members increasingly certain they are in the crosshairs of Russian aggression — are on course to spend a greater share of economic output on defense than does the United States. In the south, Romania and Moldova have been shaken by what appears to be massive Russian election meddling.
The euro area, hamstrung by overregulation, aging populations and labor shortages, is losing ground to the United States amid a widening transatlantic gulf in economic prospects.
The Stoxx Europe 600, a broad index that includes British companies, barely managed a 6 percent return this year. In the United States, the S&P 500 climbed nearly 25 percent.
That gap reflected a disparity between the buoyant U.S. economy, expected to grow by 2.8 percent in 2024, and the anemic one in the euro zone, projected to expand by just 0.8 percent.
The moment demands what Europe lacks: strong, visionary leaders.
France’s Emmanuel Macron might once have fit the bill, but he has been rendered mostly irrelevant by his own folly in calling an election that yielded a hung parliament. Germany’s Olaf Scholz, a colorless man who led a querulous coalition government, is on course to be trounced in federal elections next month. His likely successor, the prickly conservative Friedrich Merz, might have his own hands full with fractious coalition partners, to say nothing of a flatlining German economy.
The risk for Europe is not only that it will be left in the geopolitical dust, an also-ran against the U.S. and Chinese titans. It is also that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, building a full time war economy to sustain his imperial appetites, will see in the continent’s impotence the potential for vassal states, ripe for the taking.
Lee Hockstader has been The Post’s European Affairs columnist, based in Paris, since 2023. Previously he was a member of the Post editorial board; a national correspondent; a foreign correspondent; and a local reporter. He was awarded The Post’s Eugene Meyer Award for lifetime achievement in 2014.