Listen or lose: Why ignoring the far right is undermining democracy and climate action

Introduction: The empty refrain

For years now, the warning has been constant: don’t vote for the far right. It appears in headlines, political speeches, and media commentary with clockwork regularity. But what started as a well-meaning alarm has hardened into a hollow slogan — used not only to caution voters, but as a substitute for real political content.

In many parts of Europe, particularly during elections, this refrain has become the centrepiece of mainstream campaigns: “Vote for me — because at least I’m not them.” What’s offered is not a program, but a moral ultimatum. Not a vision, but a vacuum. And while this may energise those already convinced, it alienates the undecided and infuriates those already left behind.

This strategy is failing — repeatedly. The rise of the far right is not a messaging issue. It’s a policy failure, a systemic breakdown, and a refusal to listen to what people are actually saying.

When prosperity feels like a lie

Europe is objectively rich — but to many of its citizens, that wealth feels both inaccessible and unfair. While, according to Oxfam, billionaires in the EU gained an estimated €400 million per day in 2024, over a third of French farmers live below the poverty line. In France, two farmers die by suicide every day.

Real wages have stagnated. Public services are deteriorating. Young people face an economy in which hard work no longer guarantees security, let alone advancement. In an ageing society increasingly shaped by inheritance rather than merit, the ideal of social mobility is unraveling.

Oxfam reports that 74% of EU billionaire wealth now stems from inheritance, monopoly, or political connections, not innovation. The dream of meritocracy has become a myth — one that voters are no longer buying.

And it is into this vacuum — of meaning, of fairness, of hope — that the far right steps.

A project, not just promises

The far right offers something that many mainstream parties have forgotten how to provide: a story, a direction, a project. However flawed or dangerous, their message is coherent. They speak of sovereignty, tradition, national strength, and the protection of the vulnerable — at least those they define as part of “the nation.”

Meanwhile, other parties offer policy measures — technical, reactive, incremental — often divorced from lived experience. Worse, many such promises are not even kept. This constant mismatch between rhetoric and results has deepened public mistrust.

It’s not that the far right has all the answers. It’s that they act like they do.

The EU: Structure and sabotage

The European Union is often presented as a force for stability, peace, and regulation. But many of its structural decisions have amplified the crises they claim to solve.

• It liberalised capital—removing national controls on financial flows. This, in turn, unleashed speculative markets, particularly in real estate and energy, driving up housing costs and destabilising local economies.

• It promoted free trade — today the EU has 42 free trade agreements, far more than even the U.S. under pre-Trump policies (14). But this has undermined small-scale producers, squeezed labor markets, and fuelled offshoring—especially in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing.

• It integrated energy markets — but created a fragmented, volatile system plagued by price spikes, grid failures, record levels of negative pricing, and instability as recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal show.

And every time these policies lead to crises, the proposed remedy is the same: more Europe, more integration, more of what caused the problem.

To many voters, this looks like self-sabotage. Or worse, denial.

The greens and the limits of technocratic idealism

Germany’s Green Party has seen itself as a symbol of progressive transformation — but its record reveals the fragility of policies that are ideologically sound but physically and socially brittle. In trying to overhaul the system, they failed to grasp a fundamental truth: energy is not just one input among many — it underpins everything in the modern world.

The Greens pushed for rapid decarbonisation without fully considering how energy scarcity would ripple through society — raising costs, destabilising industry, and alienating the working class. They tried to change the machine while keeping the same dashboard.

Most revealingly, they never questioned the very indicators that define success. GDP remained the guiding star, even as it failed to reflect wellbeing, sustainability, or fairness. As Robert F. Kennedy warned decades ago:

It measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile.

The result? An ambitious vision measured by outdated tools. Real change cannot rely on the metrics of the system it seeks to replace. GDP today comes at a steep cost: each extra unit demands more debt, more energy, and more environmental extraction. Growth is no longer linear, and it is no longer cheap.

Our economies now rest on a triple fragility:

• The depletion of non-renewable resources like oil and minerals

• The accumulation of pollution including greenhouse gases that natural systems can no longer safely absorb

• And the rising financial cost of growth itself, with more and more debt required for every unit of GDP

Governments are running after GDP and debt at the same time — chasing two figures that increasingly conflict with social cohesion and planetary boundaries but also conflict with one another.

Without addressing social justice and inequality, climate policy will only treat symptoms and continue to provoke backlash — no matter how necessary it is.

The far right’s emotional logic

The far right taps into a powerful emotional logic:

• Why is there money for others, but not for us?

• Why are our schools underfunded, our hospitals understaffed, while billions are spent abroad?

• Why should we reduce consumption when we’re already struggling to make ends meet?

These are not irrational questions. They are deeply human. And until mainstream parties confront them directly, they will continue to lose ground.

In the face of economic fragility, people naturally choose the immediate over the abstract. As the saying goes: between the end of the month and the end of the world, most choose the former.

The truth has lost its grounding

A troubling trend runs through all of this: the collapse of the distinction between fact and truth.

Facts, increasingly, are not believed unless they align with preexisting feelings. The role of media in this shift cannot be ignored. In the name of balance, too many outlets present every issue as two sides of a coin — even when one side is empirically false and many more facets are actually relevant.

If one person says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, journalism’s job is not to quote both — it’s to check the window.

Likewise, politics has begun to mirror the emotional terrain of social media: truth is now something that feels right, not something that holds up under scrutiny.

That is a profound danger. But it cannot be countered by data alone. It must be countered by credibility — by leaders who listen, act, and live in the same world as their constituents.

Toward a new political imagination

What might a politician that truly listens look like?

• What if every elected official spent one day a quarter shadowing a disabled person, an asylum seeker, or a homeless individual—not for PR, but for perspective?

• What if public servants had to experience the housing, health, and financial systems they help design?

• What if, instead of measuring prosperity by GDP, we measured it by well-being, resilience, and fairness?

These are not utopian ideas. They are pragmatic strategies for restoring legitimacy. Because without legitimacy, even the best policies will fail—and the worst ones will rise.

Decline is not just economic — it’s civic

We often talk about economic recessions. But Europe is also in a civic recession — a decline in trust, belonging, and shared reality.

The only “project” that currently unites much of Europe is rearmament — a plan that, while perhaps geopolitically necessary, offers little to those losing jobs to AI or stuck in precarious gig work. It certainly doesn’t offer a future to those who’ve lost faith in a system that seems to remember them only at election time.

Poor people also have preferences. The same systems that trained consumers to expect perfect fruit now punish them for rejecting bruised produce at food banks. The market has shaped desires it cannot satisfy. That contradiction festers.

Time for a reckoning, not just resistance

Warnings alone will not defeat the far right. Shame will not either. If anything, both may accelerate its rise. What is needed is a full reckoning with how we got here — and a commitment to changing course.

This means:

• Acknowledging the grievances that fuel the far right, even if we reject their solutions

• Offering projects, not just policies — visions grounded in reality but animated by hope

• Rebuilding political trust through honesty, humility, accountability and proximity to the people being governed

The goal is not to mimic the far right. It is to outgrow the conditions that make them viable.

We face a critical window — perhaps two to five years — where the scale of action can still match the scale of change. The alternative is not merely political loss. It is a polycrisis unmanaged, a democratic crisis deepened, and a society fractured beyond repair.

It is time to stop reacting — and start leading.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.