Denis MacShane / Nov 2025
Photo: Shutterstock
It has been taken as a given in European politics this decade that it was only a matter of time before far-right ethnonationalist pro-Putin leaders emerged to head governments – Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD’s Alice Weidel in Germany, Nigel Farage in Britain to join Georgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Robert Fico in Slovakia. But is this true?
Belgium now has a Flemish Nationalist prime minister who has just blocked EU efforts to send frozen Russian assets to help Kyiv. Certainly the post-1945 political settlement based on two giant blocks of voters – conservative, Christian Democrat on the centre right and Social Democratic, Labour or socialist on the left with a modest place for Liberals, and in southern Europe communist parties – is now over.
Instead there is a kaleidoscope of 5 or 6 parties in most countries. The great media bosses or editors that influenced politics are gone. Daily print media is all but dead. Dozens of TV channels are available without even considering iphone news sources.
TwitterX under Elon Musk is full of extravagantly worded political polemic bordering on hate and denigration of anyone who tries to maintain a moderate, balance line in politics.
One of Europe’s best social democratic politicians this century, Frans Timmermans, has just thrown in the towel at age 64 as Dutch politics ditches its 20th century parties and opts for an uncertain if not unknown future.
The Dutch parliamentary election has produced a near dead-heat between the D66 party headed by Rob Jetten, a 38 year old gay full time political activist almost since leaving university and the PVV, (Party of Freedom) headed by the longstanding anti-immigrant Islamaphobe Geert Wilders, 61.
Wilders is the same age as Nigel Farage. Both started as demagogic Members of the European Parliament denouncing the institution that over decades has given them salaries, expenses, and pensions that Europe’s national parliamentarians can only dream of.
Farage, Wilders and other European clones of Donald Trump are taking their time = decades - to lead their nations.
Now a long Dutch process of trying to form a government begins. D66 has a few thousand more votes than PVV but each party has the same number of seats – 26 – in the 150 strong lower house in the Dutch Parliament. Thus neither can govern without forming coalitions with other parties and accepting the necessary compromises that dilute the purity of either party’s election manifesto.
The big loser is the embodiment of Dutch and European social democracy since the end of communism and the triumph of liberal globalisation after 1990. Frans Timmermans, 64, the poster-boy of European social democracy for the last 35 years is leaving politics.
He headed the Dutch Labour Party which produced a raft of prime ministers but now like social democracy all over Europe has lost its bearings. D66 is the party of university graduates but there is no longer a party for workers on offer.
Europe’s white working class which formed the support base for democratic left politics 1920-2000 has gone. It was based on battalions of men who fought in two world wars and rebuilt Europe between 1950 and 1980.
It is the end of social democracy in Europe. The white working class vote that emerged from two world wars and forced employers who needed their skills and hard work to concede good pay, time for family life, as well as free health and old age care and treatment has disappeared.
Trade union membership in Europe in the private sector has dropped to single figures. Trade unions today represent public sector workers. These unions no longer confront capitalist bosses. Instead they go on strike disrupting the public services workers rely on and expect private sectors workers to pay higher taxes to cover the demands of unions protected from the ravages of a global economy now based on production in China and exporting its unemployed to Europe or North America.
D66 is a party of graduates much as Britain’s Labour Party, the French, Italian or Spanish Socialists and German Social Democracy is today.
Timmermans and the Dutch post-worker PvDA tried to win votes by merging with the Green Party. It flopped. Ultra Green politics is a working class voter turn-off. Better off liberal professionals can afford Teslas, use bikes or work from home.
Indigenous working class citizens who start shifts at 5 a.m. and have to ferry their children around or bring home big supermarket shops need cars. They resent being told they are destroying the environment when graduate activists go off on planes to conferences in agreeable places or graduate workers fly off on nice holidays. Workers chained to automobiles for work and family can’t afford and persuaded by Green ideology.
As elsewhere in Europe the increase in volume and velocity of migrants arriving from nations with no cultural affinity with European norms, values, or faiths especially all the failed states set up after the Global North’s blundering military interventions spewed forth people fleeing poverty, or from the Islamic state and Taliban beheaders, Ayatollahs hanging gays from cranes, honour killings in Iraq, or Iran backed militias have been more than any domestic political market can bear.
The “progressives” in politics have had no Labour market policy for white working class especially untrained youngsters not going to university. Nor have they been honest about the difficulty of absorbing such a volume of overseas incomers arriving much faster than any previous wave of immigration.
The Dutch election result is being hailed by Europe’s liberal elites as signalling an end to far-right race-focused populism. But it is a false dawn. It is the end of the politics which gave hope to the local working class who will now turn to the false prophets of racial purity and closed borders economics.
