Conservatives in Europe: Fear of Being Wrong ?

Is Europe finally losing its bourgeois political centre? The political parties of the centre that once emerged from clear social conflicts seem to have lost the ability to recognise new dividing and disruptive lines. They respond to today’s challenges such as EU reform, globalisation, migration, energy prices, identity and digital acceleration with proposals from past decades. Instead of translating new social tensions into political alternatives, they try to neutralise them morally. It is politics without risk and without direction. Moral categories now dictate a fear of being wrong.

France: paralysis and nostalgia

Since the snap elections of summer 2024, France has been caught up in a permanent political crisis. Even the “king without a kingdom”, Louis de Bourbon, has been drawn into political action. In a guest column for the Journal du Dimanche, the legitimist heir to the throne warned that France faces a deep institutional crisis and that the Fifth Republic is “on the verge of collapse.” Asked under what circumstances he would place himself at France’s service, the Bourbon head replied: “Only if France desires the return of the monarchy.” He advocates a monarchy “above parties, conciliatory and unifying, defending the common good.” Better a modern monarchy, then, than further experiments even with the Rassemblement National? Meanwhile, the erratic Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is costing France billions. Gaspard de Monclin of the investment platform Overlord calculated that the chaos in Matignon led to a 2% fall in the CAC 40 stock index, wiping out €130 billion in market value, while government bond yields rose to 3.6%. To ensure that the new government of the old prime minister lasts longer than the previous fifteen hours, potential presidential hopefuls were conveniently excluded in advance.

The Netherlands: a victory without power

In the Netherlands, politics has turned into a lesson in revenge disguised as victory. Geert Wilders triumphed in the autumn 2023 elections with his Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), but his victory was swiftly domesticated by the political class. After months of negotiations, a technocratic marriage of convenience emerged and a coalition of erratic newcomers bound less by shared conviction than by mutual fear of the man who had won. Yet the keys to Het Torentje, the prime minister’s office in The Hague, were kept firmly out of Wilders’ reach. This spring, the election winner presented a ten-point plan to curb migration, nothing more than his central campaign promise and the one issue that had mobilised the Dutch electorate across social classes. It was a moment of truth for his coalition partners. The other three coalition parties, for all their fiery rhetoric against the Brussels bureaucracy, caved in the moment the European Commission raised an eyebrow. 

Brussels promptly came to the rescue, of itself, stepping in to remind The Hague that migration policy remains an EU monopoly, not a matter for national sovereignty. In a tone both admonishing and self-protective, the EU-Commission warned against any “solo act” on migration, eager to preserve the orthodoxy of a common policy even as that very policy continues to fail. The supposed Eurosceptics in The Hague, ever bold in speech but timid in office, promptly folded. Their rebellion ended where Brussels’ power began. Wilders, true to form, refused to play along. When confronted with the choice between betraying his voters or breaking the coalition, he chose rupture. On October 29, the Dutch will once again return to the polls. Yet the question remains: who bears responsibility for this chaos: the populist who insists on doing what he promised, or the establishment that prefers paralysis to principle?

Iberia: Power by Default

Across the Iberian Peninsula, socialism survives less by persuasion than by inertia. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez governs not through renewal but through barter. His parliamentary majority rests on an amnesty for Catalan separatists, an act of political self-preservation masquerading as reconciliation. The unity of Spain has become negotiable currency, traded for a few more years in the Moncloa Palace. What was once a nation’s constitutional red line has been reduced to a bargaining chip in a minority Socialist government’s daily struggle for survival. The Spanish right, meanwhile, drifts between indignation and impotence. The Partido Popular hesitates to confront Sánchez’s transactional politics, fearing that a clear alternative might frighten the centrist voter it no longer inspires. Vox, for all its fervour, remains trapped in a paradox of its own making: radical in speech, but absent from the institutional levers that matter. Thus, the Right speaks loudly and governs nowhere, while the Left governs weakly yet endures.

Across the border, Portugal mirrors this moral exhaustion. António Costa’s Socialist legacy, once wrapped in the rhetoric of moderation, now unravels under the weight of corruption scandals and a culture of impunity that stretches from Lisbon’s ministries to local councils. The new Chega party rises swiftly in the polls, its outrage genuine, its programme volatile.

Southern Europe is weary of the Left, but not yet ready for the Right. Its political reflexes are those of a continent that senses decline yet mistrusts the instruments of change. Between the ruins of socialism and the immaturity of conservatism, Iberia floats in a vacuum of conviction: a democracy that still votes, but no longer believes.

Sweden: a conservative majority afraid of itself

If southern Europe suffers from exhaustion, northern Europe suffers from inhibition. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sweden, a country that prides itself on moral clarity yet lives in political confusion. Since 2022, Stockholm has been governed by a conservative minority cabinet under Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party, technically sustained by the Sweden Democrats (SD). On paper, the right holds a majority. In practice, it behaves like an embarrassed guest at its own dinner party. 

The Sweden Democrats, with over 20% of the vote, are the third-strongest force in the Riksdag and arithmetically essential to any centre-right majority. Yet they remain exiled to the margins, tolerated in numbers, rejected in name. They influence legislation in silence but are forbidden from ministerial office, for reasons less political than moral. It is as if Sweden’s establishment believes that by keeping its own voters at arm’s length, it can preserve its virtue. The result is a political farce with Nordic decorum: a government that rules under the tacit consent of the very party it publicly pretends does not exist. Every policy victory becomes an act of quiet hypocrisy, every compromise a moral contortion. A conservative majority exists but lacks the courage to recognise itself. The arithmetic of power is there, yet the psychology of power is missing. Out of fear of moral contamination, Sweden’s conservatives refrain from exercising the authority the electorate has already granted them. What remains is a sterile coalition of the well-behaved competent administrators of decline, anxious to appear respectable even as the country’s social fabric frays. In Stockholm, as in much of Europe, moderation has become the art of not deciding.

Brussels: the geometry of paralysis

The same arithmetic tragedy repeats itself on the banks of the Ill and the boulevards of Brussels. In this parliamentary term, the European Parliament’s centre-right bloc commands, for the first time in two decades, a clear majority. The European People’s Party (EPP), the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), and the Patriots for Europe (PfE) together hold 51.1% of the chamber’s seats. Add the Sovereignists of the German AfD and their allies, and the figure rises to 55%, which is a solid, democratic majority by any standard. And yet, numbers deceive. What looks like power on paper dissolves into paralysis in practice.

The EPP, long the custodian of the Brussels establishment, fears its own electorate more than it fears the Left. The conservatives of the ECR, eager to act, are treated as unruly cousins; the Patriots, as embarrassing in-laws. Thus, the European Right lives in permanent cohabitation without consummation: numerically dominant, morally disarmed. Within this geometry of paralysis, the Left retains what the Right has lost: moral confidence. A progressive minority continues to dictate the tone of European politics precisely because it believes in something, however misguided. 

The Right, by contrast, governs as if it must constantly apologise for its own legitimacy, as though every decision required prior moral permission from its opponents. Every time a coalition of conservatives and sovereigntists approaches the possibility of action, it retreats behind the language of “responsibility”, the EU-Brussels euphemism for inaction. It is a strange spectacle: a continent governed by majorities that behave like minorities. The European Parliament mirrors the psychology of Sweden, multiplied twenty-seven times: a conservative majority that dares not be conservative. 

From the EPP’s sterile centrism to the Commission’s bureaucratic paternalism, the EU has turned compromise into a worldview and caution into a creed. As a result, policy stagnates, rhetoric flourishes, and responsibility migrates not from Brussels to the Member States, as treaties once promised, but from politicians to officials, from citizens to systems. Europe has built a machinery so intricate that it now governs by default. Those elected to lead have become caretakers of equilibrium, incapable of movement lest the balance tip.

London: where democratic instinct still breathes

Across the Channel, the air is different. In London, democracy has not died of respectability. The political class may be exhausted, but the democratic instinct still works. The old parties stagger, quarrel, and collapse but they do so in public, and that is their virtue. There, politics remains a contest of arguments, not a choreography of avoidance. After fourteen years in power, the Conservative Party lies in ruins: divided, exhausted, and intellectually bankrupt. It governs by inertia and apologises for outcomes it no longer controls. Yet its downfall has not produced the kind of managed continuity so beloved in Brussels, but rather the return of competition. 

Labour, after only a year in government, already suffers from the same fatigue of imagination. Its annual conference in Liverpool failed to ignite any sense of renewal; the party that once promised to modernise Britain now seems content to inherit a broken system without the courage to repair it. 

And so, into this vacuum steps Nigel Farage, the perennial outsider who refuses to stay outside. With Reform UK, he has seized the issues others dare not touch: national self-determination, migration, energy prices, and identity. He speaks the language of sovereignty in a country that still understands what the word means. The established parties may despise him, but they cannot ignore him. Even Labour’s strategists now quietly copy fragments of his agenda, hoping to borrow his connection to the public mood without admitting its source. 

What distinguishes Britain from the continent is not better governance, but a healthier sense of conflict. After Brexit, the United Kingdom recovered something Europe has lost: political accountability. Parties must win majorities, not construct them after the vote. Debate is open, brutal, and cleansing. Parliament is not afraid of disagreement; it feeds on it. Farage provokes, but he moves the debate. In Britain, politics still has consequences. The rest of Europe moralises its divisions; Britain argues them. The difference is decisive: in London, the fight goes on and so does the belief that politics, however imperfect, can still change things.

Europe between fear and conformity

From Paris to Berlin, from Vienna to Stockholm, the European Union finds itself caught between fear and conformity, governed less by conviction than by caution. Across the continent, the same reflex animates the old bourgeois parties: better to block than to risk, better to manage than to lead. The moral vocabulary of twentieth-century politics has hardened into a kind of secular catechism, in which every reform must first prove its virtue before it can claim its necessity. Europe no longer suffers from too much conflict, but from too little. By outlawing disagreement in the name of consensus, it has mistaken paralysis for stability. What was once the engine of democratic life—the clash of visions, the contest of ideas—has been reduced to a procedural ballet between governments and commissions, where every outcome is predetermined and every failure declared ‘responsible.’ The result is a politics that neither dares nor decides: risk-averse, bureaucratised, morally exhausted.

The tragedy of Europe today is not that it lacks a majority for change, but that it fears to use it. From Stockholm to Berlin, conservative majorities hesitate to act; from Paris to Lisbon, leftist minorities cling to moral authority long after they have lost electoral credibility. Brussels, meanwhile, confuses uniformity with unity. The Union has built so many safeguards against populism that it has forgotten how to breathe democracy. And yet, beyond the Channel, a counterexample persists.It quarrels, it errs, it exposes its wounds to daylight, but it lives. 

The British are not better governed; they are simply less afraid. They have rediscovered that freedom and conflict are twins. Europe, in contrast, hides its conflicts under the table, as if politics itself were indecent. The time may have come for the continent to learn again what the island never forgot: that democracy without disagreement is not peace, but suffocation. Politics lives from risk, not from ritual. Whoever only fears being wrong will never do what is right.