It was all kicking off.

The banks on Wall Street had suddenly collapsed and the shockwaves were rippling fast across the Atlantic. By 2011, a rebellion was rising in the streets of Europe against an establishment that had betrayed the people it claimed to serve.

We had arrived at last at the interregnum. “Everything is possible,” Wolfgang Streeck wrote of the “Bonapartist” moment, “but nothing has consequences.”

With the edifice of the establishment falling away, a space was clearing for a new radical politics. Whether it would be left or right in character remained an open question. But one thing was for certain: the repressed had returned, and the European Union would finally pay the price. “The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union,” Cédric Durand predicted in June 2016, “is the first movement of what has now become a very likely — if not yet inevitable — process dismembering the EU.”

What a difference three years make.

The European elections in May 2019, far from tearing down the remaining edifice of the political establishment, largely reinforced it. Angela Merkel’s European People’s Party may have lost 34 seats in the new parliament, but they were more than compensated by Emmanuel Macron’s Renew Europe group picking up 39. The Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the other half of the EU’s political duopoly, may have lost 31 seats, but their climate-conscious friends in the Greens gained 22 of them. Horses were traded, in other words, but the game remained unchanged.

The rebellion on the left — once heralded as an existential challenge to the European Union and the technocrats that managed it — has scarcely survived. In the May 2019 elections, the number of seats for the GUE/NGL group — the great container of Europe’s left parties — fell by 20 percent, down to the same level that it had in 2004. Two months later, the Greek national elections saw Syriza’s defeat, which not only empowered a new right-wing government in Greece, but also deprived the left group of its sole representative at the European Council. Three months after that, the Spanish national elections saw the vote share for Unidas Podemos shrink by over 40 percent compared to its 2016 showing. The left-populist party would join the coalition government — but only after the socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez made Podemos’ junior position painfully clear to the country.

Taken together, the results of these elections reflected a stunning reversal of fortune for the European Union. Britain’s exit from the EU did not inspire the “dismembering” of the Union, but its opposite: according to the 2019 Eurobarometer survey, support for the EU has rocketed to its highest level since 1983 — with favorability ratings strongest, by a long shot, among young people aged 18-29, who turned out in record numbers to vote in the EU elections.

Back in Brussels, the wheels of the institutions just keep turning. Commissioners divvy up responsibilities. Parliamentarians bargain over committees. And lobbyists swarm the corridors. “Europe is like a long marriage,” said the new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her opening statement in July 2019. “The love does not increase after the first day, but it deepens.” The slogan for her five-year presidency is equally inspired: “A Union that strives for more.”

So what happened? How did Europe’s existential crisis dissipate into business as usual? How did an insurrection for radical change become a promise to “strive for more”? And with the COVID-19 pandemic returning the continent to crisis, what does this series of events mean for the future of the European left?

“Whatever It Takes”

To answer these questions, we must first give credit where credit is due.

From the start of the financial crisis in 2008 — and even more impressively since its second phase, the sovereign debt crisis two years later — Europe’s political establishment has acted creatively, commandingly and adaptively to stave off insurrection.

Consider the case of the European Financial Stability Facility. In May 2010, with markets still in a conniption, the EU convened a weekend of emergency meetings to allay fears of financial meltdown. “We brainstormed,” said Olli Rehn, then Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro, of his repeated late-night sessions in the boardroom. “Why [were we] stuck and how could we solve that? Then I came up with the idea: why don’t we set up a special purpose vehicle?”

From Rehn’s head to the negotiating table: after hours of frantic phone calls the European Financial Stability Facility was born, a special institution based in Luxembourg that would allow the EU to lend fresh money to distressed member-states without violating any of the EU’s famously obstinate treaties. And it worked. With the Commission’s guarantee, bond yields among Europe’s southern periphery fell sharply in the two months that followed.

By the EU’s telling, the invention of the EFSF is a tale of cunning statecraft. “Thanks to the political courage and ingenuity of a few people present, we took bold steps to defend the stability of the euro,” Jean-Claude Juncker has said.

But the more important lesson was that Europe’s establishment was willing — to borrow a phrase from Mario Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank — to do “whatever it takes” to keep a bankrupt system from total collapse.

If these were system-saving solutions, they were far from system-solving ones. Draghi’s vast campaign of quantitative easing, to take another example of establishment creativity, proved effective at containing a dangerous deflationary slide in the European economy — in the short-term. But it did nothing to change the harsh constraints of austerity that strangled Europe of public investment. Even with the ECB spraying money across Europe’s financial sector, net public investment in the Eurozone fell to zero in 2015 and stayed there.

Nonetheless, Draghi’s famous proclamation reflects the command and commitment with which the European institutions reacted to their existential crisis. The high officials of the EU did not break, divide, smash, or grab what they could on their way out of the door. Instead, they behaved with steely solidarity for their fellow technocrats — far better internationalists than the left movements against which they clashed.

In the case of Greece — the most flammable in Europe, where a rebellion on the left had risen to demand an end to the country’s debt bondage — the so-called “troika” of the Commission, the ECB and the IMF lived up to their name, iron-clad and neatly choreographed. The IMF’s Christine Lagarde may have had profound reservations about the merits of austerity — and she may have expressed them sympathetically to the Greeks on the other end of the negotiating table — but she never went so far as to undermine her partners’ position. The bonds of solidarity between Europe’s technocrats, we learned, were much stronger than those of the left that sought to challenge them.

The Rise of Techno-Populism

Of course, the institutions of the troika were not able to pre-empt every political challenge — particularly those that came from the right. Since the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2010, the forces of the far right have found a new voice and strong political foothold to advance their brand of Eurosceptic rage.

In some cases, like Germany or in the historically red Spanish region of Andalusia, these parties entered parliament for the first time. In others, like Italy, the far right even came to government on a promise to confront the political establishment in Brussels. “We will go to Europe to change the rules that have impoverished Italians,” Salvini vowed back in March 2018.

But here — it must be said — Europe’s establishment has moved masterfully to accommodate, tame and neutralize the populist threat.

Consider Hungary. Since assuming the premiership in 2010, Viktor Orbán has moved faster and more aggressively than any other politician to push Hungary toward full-blown authoritarianism, rewriting the constitution, rewiring the judiciary, centralizing authority, controlling civil society, crushing academic freedom, criminalizing humanitarian aid, and — of course — building a giant fence along its border. And he has frequently clashed with the European Union in the process, arguing that “people who love their freedom must save Brussels from Sovietisation, from people who want to tell us who we should live with in our countries.”

And yet Orbán and his party Fidesz remain members of the European People’s Party (EPP), home to Angela Merkel and a broad set of familiar faces from Europe’s center-right. Back in March 2019, the EPP formally suspended Fidesz from its ranks, stripping it of its ability to attend meetings or nominate its members to high posts. But suspension is very far from expulsion and the intervening months suggest that the EPP is in no hurry to alienate its Hungarian friends.

In late August, Merkel joined Orbán in the city of Sopron to celebrate the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border 30 years ago. Merkel’s intention might have been to send a signal to Orbán that generosity to refugees is an essential feature of their shared history. But Orbán saw it differently. “We have now built walls on the southern borders, so that those Germans for whom walls were brought down 30 years ago can now live in safety.” Merkel, for her part, acknowledged “different views” between Germany and Hungary, but supported Orbán’s view that Europe must improve its border security.

When Merkel ally and EPP member Ursula von der Leyen decided on the distribution of portfolios in the new European Commission, Orbán was not denied his due. László Trócsányi, Orbán’s trusted ally and former justice minister, was appointed as EU enlargement commissioner, in charge of managing relations in the “neighbourhood” of Europe — and the flows of migrants that pass through it. So much for a suspension: von der Leyen went so far as to name the migration portfolio “Protecting Our European Way of Life,” before amending the name after an intense public backlash.

If the EPP is attempting to find a balance between jingoism and liberalism among its ranks, governments at the national level have sought to fuse them.

Greece’s New Democracy provides perhaps the best example of this hybrid. On the one hand, New Democracy is undoubtedly the party of the political establishment: prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the son of a former prime minister, who — following stints at McKinsey and Chase Manhattan Bank — returned to Greece promising a “bold wave of reforms” to make sure that Greece was “no longer the black sheep of Europe.”

On the other hand, New Democracy has risen to power on the strength and shamelessness of its right-populist rhetoric: Mitsotakis vehemently opposed the Macedonia name change, siding with the nationalists rioting in the streets of Greece; he also appointed a cabinet that includes Holocaust deniers and advocates of mass deportation of asylum-seekers.

The result has been neatly described by Chris Bickerton as “techno-populism” — technocracy + populism. It is a strange blend that is also on display in Italy. When Matteo Salvini pulled his party Lega out of its governing coalition, the Five Star Movement found a new partner in the Democratic Party — those social democrats who proved neither social nor particularly democratic in their steadfast implementation of austerity in the crisis period. In Italy today, then, some of Europe’s purest populists are wedded to elements of its deepest establishment, an existential threat first posed by Five Star to the European Union has been downgraded to a mere preference for reform. “I was never one of those who wanted to leave Europe or weaken it,” Italian foreign minister and Five Star leader Luigi di Maio told the Economist in April, just three years after his confident pronouncement that he would, in fact, “vote to leave the euro as it stands.”

What a difference three years make.  

It is a common refrain in Europe that “the Troika always wins.” But the emergence of these techno-populist hybrids suggests that they do not always win by force of confrontation — but also by co-optation. The populist right is far from dead, and may continue to gain ground in the coming years at the expense of the establishment parties competing against them. But the concessions made to accommodate these populist parties have meant that Brussels is no longer their bogeyman — even if Europe has, for the very same reason, become a much more terrifying place.