The fall of Europe: the bill comes due for leaders who mistook their promises for results

Europe is falling because it has confused managing inherited wealth with the ability to create new wealth. Part of its political leadership turned public spending, the proliferation of rules and extreme regulation, and supposed moral superiority into sufficient credentials to govern. Productivity, solvency, and social cohesion were pushed aside. Today they have returned to collect a bill that no amount of rhetoric can cancel.

On October 24, France recorded 410,000 protesters and 1,314 arrests, according to the Interior Ministry's provisional tally. More than 3,000 businesses were looted, and historic buildings were destroyed. The authorities pointed to the involvement of radical far-left groups in the attacks; Islamic extremists also joined them. In Milan, the looting and destruction of October 17 and 18 caused damage to businesses that Confcommercio estimated at close to one million euros. Something similar happened in Rome. In Barcelona, on October 24, 23 businesses were looted or vandalized, and firefighters were called out 33 times to fires in public streets.

Behind those figures lie destroyed livelihoods, intimidated shopkeepers, and attacks on public property. Anyone running a business is required to pay taxes on time. The security those taxes fund deserves the same promptness. Peaceful protest must be protected, and vandalism punished with the utmost severity. No cause turns someone else's business into spoils.

Fritz Scharpf explained that legitimacy also depends on the ability to solve problems. That is the corrosive contradiction of governments that collect vast sums yet struggle to guarantee services, opportunities, and security. When the protection they promise deteriorates, institutional rhetoric loses credibility.

Responsibility lies with leaders and their decisions

Europe's postwar left deserves unsparing scrutiny for defending spending and debt commitments without securing a sufficient productive base, turning regulations into displays of virtue, and treating too many demands for integration as suspect and unworkable. Responsibility extends to the center-right, which preserved those policies or postponed reform. Since 2004, the European Commission has been headed by leaders of the European People's Party. Changing the letterhead does not erase the bill.

Mancur Olson studied how organized interests accumulate privileges and block adjustments that would benefit society as a whole. His warning sheds light on a Europe where every protection finds defenders and every reform rallies opponents. Citizens pay for agreements they never negotiated. Recognizing problems while systematically postponing their solution amounts to managing decline with good manners.

Welfare requires balanced books

In the second quarter of 2026, gross public debt stood at 139.9% of GDP in Italy, 119.1% in France, 110.2% in Belgium, and 101.4% in Spain, according to Eurostat. The United Kingdom stood at 100.5%, according to the ONS, using a comparable measure. Spain had reduced its ratio year on year. The trajectories differ, but the fiscal constraints facing several major countries are evident.

France spent the equivalent of 57.3% of GDP in 2025 and ended the year with a deficit of 5.1%. The size of the state does not guarantee balanced finances. High debt ties up future resources and leaves less room to respond to crises. Its sustainability depends on growth, interest rates, and budgetary discipline.

For a single person with no children earning the average wage, the OECD calculated a tax wedge in 2025 of 52.5% of labor costs in Belgium and 47.2% in France, compared with the organization's average of 35.1%. This includes taxes and contributions paid by employees and employers. Such a burden demands results, not indulgence.

Buchanan and Wagner analyzed the political incentive to grant benefits now and defer their costs. The officeholder takes the applause; a later budget gets the bill. The left that proclaims itself the defender of the welfare state must explain how it will preserve it when its promises grow faster than the ability to finance them and the difference is added to the debt.

Defending pensions and essential services requires priorities and effectiveness. Shielding every budget item as a 'social achievement' can endanger the achievements that truly matter. The welfare state loses its footing when its obligations rest on an economy that finds it increasingly difficult to renew itself.

Demography also presents its bill

The European Union's fertility rate fell to 1.34 children per woman in 2024; Spain recorded 1.10. At the beginning of 2025, 22% of the EU's population was aged 65 or older. Pension spending amounted to 12.3% of the Union's GDP in 2023. Living longer is an achievement; financing longer retirements requires productivity, employment, and foresight.

Net immigration has offset the natural population decline, but increasing the number of residents and increasing the number of productive taxpayers are different processes. Formal employment and integration are needed. A serious family policy must also reduce the obstacles posed by housing, employment, and balancing work and family life for those who want children. No population pyramid can be repaired with cheap speeches from the same old politicians.

Talent finds other destinations

The Commission's January 2026 competitiveness report put the Union's productivity per hour, adjusted for purchasing power, at 78.5% of the U.S. level in 2024. Venture capital amounted to just 0.06% of GDP, one-tenth of the U.S. share. That weakness makes it harder to turn knowledge into companies capable of growing.

A Joint Research Centre study published in 2022, using data through mid-2021, identified 40 headquarters relocations abroad among 147 unicorns originating in the EU; 32 went to the United States. The Draghi report reiterated that warning. Relocating a company's headquarters does not mean shutting down all European operations, but it reveals difficulties in retaining companies with great potential.

Switzerland and Sweden still lead WIPO's 2026 innovation index. Europe retains extraordinary capabilities. Precisely for that reason, it is all the more serious that its leaders maintain barriers to putting them to use. Talent and capital seek places where they can grow; they have no obligation to finance any government's nostalgia.

The green transition must answer for its results

According to the IEA, electricity for the Union's energy-intensive industries cost more than twice as much as in the United States in 2025. Germany completed its nuclear phaseout in 2023, following decisions by Social Democrats, Greens, and Merkel's center-right. Retiring firm generating capacity with low emissions while promoting electrification demands answers about costs and alternatives.

Renewables generated 47.3% of the EU's electricity in 2025; nuclear generation supplies another share. Electricity generation still uses fossil fuels, and the transition requires grids and storage. Climate change still has scientific backing. The promise of a cheap and simple transformation must answer for results that have yet to materialize.

The environmentalist left must account for emissions, supply, and the final price. Invoking the planet confers no immunity from bad industrial policy. Imports of electric vehicles made in China also require scrutiny of the footprint of their factories and batteries. Social and environmental responsibility does not stop at the customs border.

Integration requires governance

In 2025, 45.3% of adults with non-EU citizenship living in the Union were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, compared with 18.2% of nationals. Integration must be measured by employment, economic independence, and civic participation. Solemn declarations of intent do not heal a social fracture.

In 2024/25, the United Kingdom spent some £4 billion on support for asylum seekers, including £2.1 billion on hotels. Receiving asylum seekers entails costs that must be acknowledged and funded. Concealing them harms residents and newcomers alike.

Democratic authorities must rigorously control their borders, rule on applications for protection, and demand compliance with the law. Integration requires language skills, work, and shared duties. The left that dismisses those demands weakens the rules of coexistence it is obliged to defend, starting with its own people.

Islamism that seeks to subordinate civil law to religious authority is absolutely incompatible with Western freedoms. Women's equality and freedom of conscience are nonnegotiable. Muslim citizens share the same rights and obligations, including protection against those who seek to impose an orthodoxy on them. Defending the Christian, humanist, and liberal heritage requires institutions capable of protecting it, because that is the legacy of the West's forebears, who gave their lives for the freedoms and rights enjoyed today.

Europe's promise is crumbling

That is why I speak of a fall. The pretense of guaranteeing welfare through obligations without sufficient backing, securing competitiveness by multiplying obstacles, and preserving coexistence without requiring people to fulfill their duties has collapsed. The strengths Europe retains make its leadership all the more culpable. The Western Roman Empire, whose fall is dated to 476, left a warning: a heritage can outlive those who lost the ability to sustain it.

An economy that makes production more expensive and innovation more difficult loses ground to those offering better conditions. Competition for investment and knowledge thus opens an opportunity for the Americas as a whole. The continuity of the West will depend on societies capable of turning their freedoms into prosperity. The Americas must prepare to take up that mantle.

The Americas as a whole: the West's new center of gravity

Talent is nurtured in universities, technical institutes, and research centers across the continent. It is found in Canada and the United States, in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and the rest of South America. Differences in funding and scale demand cooperation. No country in the Americas should resign itself to exporting brains and buying back the products of their intelligence.

Brazilian engineering at Embraer, Argentine nuclear technology at INVAP, and the antivenoms developed by the University of Costa Rica's Clodomiro Picado Institute demonstrate homegrown capacity to research, design, and compete. They show that the Americas already produce knowledge and solutions for the world. Their universities and companies can expand that role if they find financing and the conditions to grow.

Costa Rica exported $10.927 billion in medical devices in 2025, accounting for 48% of its goods exports. Panama connects oceans. The IEA identifies opportunities for Latin America to process minerals that currently leave for other regions. We have the resources and capabilities to apply more knowledge to what we produce and retain more value within the continent.

Our ambition must be to develop our own technologies, patents, and companies. Connecting markets, research, and capital would allow us to combine energy, food, and minerals more effectively with the scientific and industrial capacity of the Americas. Every country must be able to expand its role in design, manufacturing, and specialized services. Natural wealth takes on another dimension when its owners also master the knowledge that transforms it.

That project requires legal certainty, high educational standards, protection for investment, and governments capable of controlling crime and delivering infrastructure without letting the permitting process drag on forever. Someone else's decline does not manufacture our prosperity. The Americas would squander their opportunity if they copied the fiscal and bureaucratic complacency that has weakened a decaying Europe.

Our task is to build that leadership with the intelligence of the entire continent and the freedom of its citizens to create. The Western legacy needs societies capable of sustaining it, enriching it, and carrying it forward. Europe's leadership must answer for having mortgaged its promise. The Americas must demonstrate that a civilization can also renew its greatness by shifting the center of its dynamism.

Europe can go on charging admission to its past. The Americas have what it takes to produce the future of the West.