How to disarm populists? Europe’s mainstream institutions remain far from agreeing on either the diagnosis or the cure, recent studies suggest.
Europe’s wave of politics offering simple answers to complex questions has generated a vast literature of diagnosis, and a surprisingly thin one of remedy. Several recent contributions attempt, from very different vantage points, to answer the harder question: not why populism rose, but what, if anything, can society do about it.
A Cambridge sociologist’s data-driven study of 75,000 voters, a Rome-based think-tank’s analysis of EU legitimacy, and a Vatican-adjacent bishops’ conference statement on values and migration each approach the problem differently. Read together, they form a more complete picture than any one of them manages alone.
The real fuel
Start with the data, because it is the most inconvenient for the conventional wisdom. Lorenza Antonucci, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, has spent years mining surveys of more than 75,000 voters across ten European countries during the peak populist years of 2015 to 2018. Her conclusion is blunt: immigration was not the primary driver. Financial anxiety was.
In Germany, France and Sweden, scoring above average for money worries increased the probability of voting for a populist party (left or right) by 17 to 20 percentage points. Italy, Spain and the Netherlands feel the effect on a smaller scale, at between four and ten points. In a political environment where swings of five or six points routinely win or lose elections, these are not marginal effects. They are the ballgame.
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Equally striking is what Ms Antonucci finds about work. Job dissatisfaction—not unemployment, but the grinding experience of high-pressure, low-autonomy, poorly rewarded employment—increased populist support by up to 12 percentage points across most large European nations. The picture that emerges is not of a lumpenproletariat abandoned by globalisation, but of a broad lower-middle class: employed, often stably so, but chronically anxious.
The gender dimension is particularly sharp. For men, working under tight deadlines pushed the probability of voting radical right from 14 to 18 per cent; feeling underpaid and unrecognised pushed it from 12 to nearly 20 per cent. For women, economic strain mattered most: difficulty living on one’s income raised the probability of voting populist from 18 to 25 per cent.
The security vacuum
Ms Antonucci’s explanation for why immigration became the political lightning rod despite not being the root cause is important. Mainstream parties, she argues, spent two decades pushing competitiveness, deregulation and targeted benefits while quietly abandoning the language of collective security.
Populists stepped into the vacuum, selling security to people who felt they had been denied it. “Europe’s mainstream parties have abandoned much of the traditional political ground on security, family and social safety nets,” she writes, “focusing instead on enhancing competitiveness through deregulation, hire-and-fire flexibility, and offering more targeted benefits. This has made our societies more economically competitive, but less socially secure.”
On the right, that meant welfare chauvinism — security for “our own.” On the left, redistribution and anti-elite solidarity. The anti-migrant message worked not because most voters were primarily concerned about immigration, but because it gave a face and a scapegoat to anxieties that were fundamentally economic and existential.
From market to protection
Eleonora Poli, a researcher at the Centro Politiche Europee in Rome, arrives at a compatible diagnosis from a different direction. Her paper traces the slow collapse of what she calls “market-based output legitimacy” — the post-war bargain in which citizens tolerated Brussels because economic integration delivered prosperity. That bargain began to crack with the 2008 financial crisis and has not recovered.
Populist and Eurosceptic parties’ combined vote share rose from roughly 12 per cent in the early 1990s to around 30 per cent by 2022, a trajectory that no amount of technocratic competence has reversed. The EU’s response has been an expanding social agenda: the European Pillar of Social Rights, the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive, the SURE unemployment instrument, and most recently a 2026 Anti-Poverty Strategy of unprecedented ambition.
Ms Poli’s assessment of this record is measured but pointed. Social indicators have improved at the margins. Populist support has not declined. The reason, she argues, is that EU social policy largely consists of strategies, recommendations and soft coordination rather than directly delivered, well-funded programmes. That is also a structural limitation of EU social policy: member states retain primary responsibility for many social issues, while the EU’s role often resorts to coordination, recommendations and setting common standards. People do not feel protected by a directive. They feel protected by a job, a home, an affordable energy bill.
A civilisational bet
Her proposed reorientation is the most intellectually ambitious element of the three contributions. Rather than doing more welfare, she argues, the EU should redefine what protection means. Drawing on the 2024 Draghi competitiveness report, she makes the case for the EU as a provider of strategic public goods that no individual member state can supply at the necessary scale. The transition, she writes, is “not a policy adjustment but a civilisational bet: that a union built on market integration can reinvent itself as a strategic actor capable of shaping the conditions in which its citizens live, work, and feel secure.”
Not a policy adjustment but a civilisational bet: that a union built on market integration can reinvent itself as a strategic actor capable of shaping the conditions in which its citizens live, work, and feel secure. — Eleonora Poli, Centro Politiche Europee
The areas she identifies are telling: industrial competitiveness, energy security, digital infrastructure, defence. The logic is structural rather than redistributive. Citizens who feel economically mobile, technologically capable and physically secure are less susceptible to the politics of relative deprivation. That seems to be the emotional engine of populist recruitment. The EU’s legitimacy comes not from cushioning failure but from creating the conditions in which success is possible.
The proposed 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, if it survives Council negotiations intact, would represent a significant institutional bet on this argument. Agricultural subsidies are projected to fall from roughly 31 per cent to around 15 per cent of total spending. Defence would rise fivefold to 6.55 per cent. Competitiveness, innovation and industry would take 22.6 per cent. The clean transition would absorb 35 per cent. This is not a welfare budget. It is an investment budget.
The moral register
Its political logic is that visible, tangible improvements in citizens’ material conditions (cheaper energy, better connectivity, more competitive industries) will do more for EU legitimacy than any number of anti-poverty strategies drafted in Brussels and implemented unevenly across 27 member states.
The third voice in this conversation is the most unusual and, in some respects, the most honest about what the other two leave out. COMECE, the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, frames the populist challenge in explicitly moral and theological terms, following its audience with Pope Leo XIV.
Bishop Mariano Crociata, the president of COMECE, described the EU as a “project of peace” whose mission is being weakened by populism and the lack of unity it produces. Archbishop Antoine Hérouard of Dijon insisted that creating conditions for dialogue and peaceful coexistence “is a responsibility that goes beyond laws and institutions”.
The Church and the scapegoat
Bishop Czeslaw Kozon of Copenhagen addressed immigration directly, lamenting that migrants are being turned into scapegoats. He noted that in many Northern European countries the Catholic Church is itself largely composed of immigrants. Their arrival, he said, brought new life to parishes that might otherwise have disappeared. “For this reason,” Mr Kozon said, “as a Church in Northern countries, we have at least two reasons to stand with migrants: on the one hand humanitarian reasons, and on the other genuinely ecclesial reasons.”
“Unfortunately immigrants are often turned into scapegoats, into the enemies of society. What appears relatively new is the way populism uses immigration, transforming it into an alleged threat to many societies.” — Bishop Czeslaw Kozon, COMECE
COMECE is not proposing a policy programme. It is proposing a moral vocabulary: solidarity, dignity, the common good, the intrinsic value of the person regardless of origin. Its planned ‘Rethinking Europe’ conference in 2027 aims to recover the ethical foundations on which the post-war settlement was originally built — the register that market efficiency and strategic investment alike tend to crowd out.
Ms Antonucci’s research is the most empirically rigorous and the most politically useful. Its central finding (that financial insecurity and job dissatisfaction, not immigration, are the primary drivers of populist voting) is both well-evidenced and actionable. Its weakness is that it is better at explaining the past than prescribing for the future. The data covers 2015 to 2018; the landscape has shifted considerably since.
Where each falls short
More importantly, the book’s implicit prescription—that mainstream parties should reclaim the language and substance of security—is easier to state than to execute. Fragmented party systems, fiscal constraints and genuine disagreement about what security means all stand in the way. Knowing what went wrong is not the same as knowing how to fix it.
Ms Poli’s paper is the most structurally ambitious. The shift from market legitimacy to protective legitimacy, and from welfare redistribution to strategic public goods, is a genuinely novel framing that takes seriously both the EU’s institutional limitations and its comparative advantages. Its weakness is a certain optimism about implementation. The MFF is a statement of intent, not a guarantee of delivery.
The history of EU budget negotiations suggests that her investment priorities will face sustained pressure from member states with different interests. And the paper is largely silent on the political communication challenge: translating investments in energy, defence and digital infrastructure into felt citizen experience (the kind of tangible protection that changes voting behaviour) is a problem that no budget line automatically solves.
The shape of an answer
COMECE’s contribution is the most honest about the limits of technocratic and economic solutions, and the most willing to say that Europe’s crisis is partly a crisis of values. Its weakness is the mirror image of its strength: the moral vocabulary it offers is compelling in the abstract but thin on mechanisms. Solidarity and dignity are not self-executing. The gap between affirming principles and embedding them in daily life is very wide indeed.
What the three sources suggest, read together, is that no single register (economic, institutional or moral) is sufficient on its own. Ms Antonucci shows that the problem is rooted in material life: bills, wages, job quality, the daily experience of insecurity. Ms Poli shows that the EU’s best available response is structural investment in the conditions for prosperity, not welfare sticking-plasters.
Financial insecurity and disillusionment with poor-quality jobs are at the heart of Europe’s populist boom. — Lorenza Antonucci, University of Cambridge
COMECE shows that the political and social fabric in which those investments must operate is held together by values and relationships that markets and directives cannot substitute. The populist parties understood this intuitively. They offered economic protection, cultural solidarity and moral clarity simultaneously, however dishonestly packaged.
The mainstream response has tended to offer one at a time, in the language of the institution doing the offering. A more durable answer would need to do all three at once — and to do it in a way that ordinary people, anxious about their bills and their jobs and their place in a changing world, can actually feel.
That is a large ask. But then, so was building a common market from the rubble of 1945.
