The Guardian view on combating Europe’s national populists: protect the less well-off from the winds of change | Editorial

As EU countries face multiple challenges in a new era, they must fight to preserve the continent's social model. That means a new economic approach

More than a year after the election that handed Donald Trump a decisive comeback victory, the Democratic party has still not released its postmortemanalysis. But last week, an influential progressive lobby group published its own. Kamala Harris's campaign, its authors argued, failed to connect with core constituencies because it did not focus enough on addressing basic economic anxieties. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, progressives neglected the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people's minds.

As the EU braces for a tumultuous period of politics between now and the end of the decade, that is a lesson that needs to be fully absorbed in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. The White House, as its recently published national security strategy makes clear, is hopeful that patriotic" parties in Europe will soon replicate Mr Trump's success. In the EU's Franco-German engine room, Marine Le Pen's National Rally (RN) and Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) lead the polls, backed by large swaths of blue-collar voters. But among mainstream leaders and parties, it is hard to discern a response that is adequate to troubling times.