Hitler was cornered in his Berlin bunker, desperate and approaching suicide, when he declared: “I am Europe’s last chance.” As a continent burned and lay devastated by his own actions, he still presented himself as the final hope for protecting Europe from its enemies: the Bolsheviks, Jews and democracies supposedly conspiring with capital against workers.
The comparison is deliberately unsettling. As El País argues in an essay examining the resurgence of European ultra-populism, Hitler had already claimed that he alone could save the essence of his country. Today’s new populist movements are increasingly presenting themselves in similar terms: as the political force uniquely capable of rescuing societies from decline, insecurity and frustration.
Their influence extends beyond elections. They dominate increasingly toxic conversations on social media and exploit what the article describes as electorates transformed into repositories of frustration. In doing so, they risk appropriating the very idea of Europe: the cosmopolitan Europe associated by writer George Steiner with the café, where people of different backgrounds could read, talk, mingle and leave without hatred.
That image now appears increasingly fragile. The fear of the outsider has become a powerful political instrument, turning difference into suspicion and migrants into symbols of a wider social anxiety. El País points to the case of a 13-year-old girl who was reportedly shouted at as an “invader” and accused of having tuberculosis because her appearance marked her as the Other.
The question, however, is not simply why the far right is gaining ground, but why so many people are willing to listen.
A recently published essay, Siete perfiles de una Centroeuropa by the distinguished translator Adan Kovacsics, offers one possible way of understanding the problem. The book examines the role played by major writers of the last century in constructing the idea of Central Europe, a region now described as deprived of hope and increasingly dominated by fear.
The political advance of the far right is difficult to ignore. It has surged past 40% of the vote in German regional elections, exceeded 40% in Hungary and Poland, governs Italy with 35% of the vote, and has reached 34% in France ahead of the possibility of Marine Le Pen seeking the presidency. For El País, this raises a deeper question about the apparent disintegration of a Central European ideal that emerged from the devastation of war and dictatorship.
Yet the source of this discontent remains poorly understood. Political opponents often define it, condemn it or attempt to defeat it, but struggle to offer practical alternatives capable of addressing both genuine problems and imagined anxieties. Meanwhile, voters continue to inhabit what resembles a Kafkaesque story: watching the mountains burn without fully understanding why.
The historical perspective offered by Kovacsics is particularly revealing through Stefan Zweig. His The World of Yesterday is one of the most admired accounts of European civilisation and famously idealises the period before the First World War as an age of security. But that supposedly secure Europe was also an era in which millions of Europeans emigrated to America. Italians, Irish, Swedes, Spaniards and Jews left in search of survival.
In Zweig’s Vienna, Kovacsics notes, almost half of the flats, most of them tiny, housed subtenants. More than 60,000 people lived as bed lodgers, sleeping in kitchens or corners of rooms shared with the principal tenant. Many spent their free time wandering the city or passing the hours in cafés.
The romantic Europe of cafés, therefore, was never quite as secure as memory suggests. Nor was the mass migration of impoverished Europeans towards America consistent with an entirely comfortable golden age. Perhaps the lost world was never as perfect as later generations imagined. Perhaps that was part of why it was lost.
That raises an uncomfortable question for Europe today. Is the Europe of the present really as secure, successful and exemplary as it appears? Or is it already being idealised by those who may one day remember it as their own lost world?
While the privileged drink cappuccino in elegant cafés, a delivery rider may be cycling through dark streets to deliver a cold hamburger to someone who cannot imagine owning a home, raising children without financial anxiety or finding secure work.
And perhaps that is where the political challenge lies. If established European politics cannot understand those frustrations, others will offer an answer. The most dangerous message may not be that Europe has problems, but that one person, one movement or one ideology alone possesses the solution.
The question confronting Europe is therefore brutally simple: when someone appears on the screen and says, “I am your last chance”, who will be willing to ask what made so many people desperate enough to believe them?
