“Let them eat cake!”

One. A gap you can measure

It is tempting to treat the gulf between Europe’s governing class and its voters as a matter of mood, the sort of thing that commentators assert and nobody can test. It can, however, be measured, and one of the most careful attempts to measure it remains a study published by Chatham House in June 2017. Its authors surveyed a representative sample of 10,000 citizens in ten European countries, from the United Kingdom and France to Poland and Hungary, alongside more than 1,800 people in positions of influence in politics, the media, business and civil society, and then compared the two.

The results were stark – not subtle. The elite group was markedly more liberal and more optimistic than the public, and markedly more likely to have experienced the benefits of European integration for itself, since only 34 per cent of the public felt they had benefited from the European Union, against 71 per cent of the elite. A majority of the public (54 per cent) thought their country had been a better place to live twenty years earlier. Large sections of the public were anxious about the effects of immigration, and the authors found that the division within the public between liberal and more authoritarian-minded voters, on questions of identity above all, mattered more than income or hardship. One of them, Matthew Goodwin, warned that Europe’s leaders would need to do more to address the gap between their own attitudes and those of the people they governed. That warning is now nine years old.

American data tell a similar story, with a twist. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which unusually surveys both the public and a sample of ‘opinion leaders’, found in 2002 that 60 per cent of Americans regarded immigration as a critical threat, against 14 per cent of leaders. In 2004 it found that 54 per cent of the public wanted legal immigration reduced, against 10 per cent of leaders. By the summer of 2025, however, the American public had moved the other way, with support for legal immigration at its highest level since the Council began asking, and with the sharpest division now running between the parties rather than between the public and its leaders. The lesson is not that the gap is fixed, but that it responds to events, including the events that leaders set in motion themselves.

What the public wants, moreover, is more specific and more reasonable than its critics allow. When the Pew Research Center asked people in fourteen countries in 2016 what it takes to be truly one of them, a median of 97 per cent in the ten European Union countries surveyed said that speaking the national language was at least somewhat important, and 86 per cent said the same of sharing national customs and traditions, while birthplace mattered markedly less. Fewer called them very important (77 and 48 per cent respectively), but the order was the same. Those are cultural and learnable conditions of belonging, which newcomers can meet, and they describe the preservation of the familiar far better than any story about race. Polite society has nevertheless tended to hear such concerns as something darker, and to answer them with sentiment rather than policy, which is precisely how cracks are papered over rather than repaired. Populism, for all its flaws, has found its audience in the space that this leaves among people desperate to breathe free of the twin tyrannies of political correctness and excessive politeness on fundamentals they care about.

Two. The internationalised class

Part of the explanation for the gap lies in who the elite are and how they got there. In Britain, the Sutton Trust’s study Elitist Britain, published in 2019 with the Social Mobility Commission, examined more than 5,000 people in 37 categories of top jobs. It found that 39 per cent had been educated privately, more than five times the share of the population as a whole, and that 24 per cent had studied at Oxford or Cambridge, against roughly 1 per cent of the population. The concentration was sharpest where power is least accountable to voters: 65 per cent of senior judges and 59 per cent of permanent secretaries in the civil service had been privately educated, and 71 per cent of senior judges had been to Oxbridge. It extended to the Cabinet as well, where 57 per cent of ministers in 2019 were Oxbridge graduates. The Trust’s 2025 edition found little change, with 36 per cent of those in top jobs privately educated against 39 per cent in 2019, and one in four having gone from a private school to a Russell Group university.

The pattern is not peculiarly British. The Dutch political scientists Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille have shown that Europe’s parliaments have become what they call diploma democracies, in which university graduates are heavily over-represented and citizens with less formal education have been steadily marginalised. France has long drawn its governing class from Sciences Po and the École nationale d’administration (since replaced by the Institut national du service public), and a handful of elite ‘Ivy League’ universities play a similar role in Washington DC.

Shared education produces shared assumptions, and mobility deepens them. The people at the top of Western societies increasingly study, work and settle across borders; they sit on the same boards, attend the same conferences and read the same newspapers. A senior official in Brussels may therefore have more in common with her counterparts in Washington or Berlin than with the voters of her own home town. The British writer David Goodhart described the division in 2017 as one between ‘Anywheres’, mobile and credentialled people (roughly a quarter of the population, on his estimate) whose identity travels with them, and ‘Somewheres’, perhaps half the population, whose identity is rooted in a place and its ways. The American historian Christopher Lasch had described the same drift a generation earlier as the revolt of the elites, since it was the elites, rather than the masses, who were withdrawing from the common life of the nation.

None of this makes the internationalised class wicked, and much of what it believes is admirable. It does, however, explain the schism, and why so many of its members find it genuinely difficult to see the world as their less mobile compatriots see it. It also explains why their policies so often answer to an international consensus of their peers (on migration, on trade and on the pace of social change) rather than to the electorate at home. Where the two conflict, it is the electorate that has the vote.

Three. What evolution left us

Beneath the sociology lies something older. Human beings evolved in small groups, often tribal, that competed with rival groups for territory and resources, and many of our evolved instincts produce the psychology derived from that history. In a celebrated series of experiments in the early 1970s, the social psychologist Henri Tajfel showed that people assigned to groups on the most trivial grounds imaginable would nonetheless favour their own group over others, even when doing so cost them nothing and gained them nothing. The economists Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles argued in Science in 2007 that loyalty to one’s own group and hostility towards outsiders may have evolved together, each making the other possible. The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have since found that liberals rely chiefly on the moral foundations of care and fairness, whereas conservatives draw more evenly on all five, including loyalty, authority and sanctity.

The same evolutionary story, however, has a second chapter that is equally important. The groups that prospered were not only those that fought well but also those that learned to trade, to marry across boundaries and to borrow useful ideas from their neighbours, and every successful civilisation has combined attachment to its own customs with openness to exchange. Tribalism, in this sense, is cultural rather than racial. It can express itself along ethnic lines, partly because differences of appearance are visible, but what binds a group together in the long run are shared beliefs and ways of life, and what divides groups most stubbornly are incompatible beliefs.

Two cautions are necessary. The first is that the science is contested (a reanalysis published in 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the Choi and Bowles result does not hold under realistic assumptions about how genetically distinct ancient groups really were, and some of the moral-foundations findings have faced difficulty in replication). The second, and more fundamental, is that explaining an instinct is not the same as justifying it. The point of this history is not that tribal feeling is always right, but that policies which cut against it and prefer to pretend it does not exist or does not matter will fail, and that leaders who treat it as a moral defect in their own voters will lose them. The political scientist Karen Stenner has shown that people with a strong predisposition towards order and conformity are activated by perceived threats to shared norms, which suggests that it is rapid and unmanaged change, rather than difference per se, that turns ordinary attachment into backlash.

Four. Oil and water

If skin colour were the problem, integration would be easy, since colour tells us nothing about what a person believes. The harder problem is belief itself. Where the convictions of newcomers and hosts are compatible, differences of appearance fade within a generation or two, as the history of every immigrant nation shows. Where convictions genuinely collide, however, on the equality of women, on the relationship between religious law and civil law, or on the freedom to mock what others hold sacred, the two can behave like oil and water.

The evidence here needs careful reading, since it points in two directions at once. The most careful comparative study, by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, found that the basic social values of Muslim migrants in Western countries sit roughly midway between those of their countries of origin and those of their new homes, which is to say that assimilation happens, although gradually. A study of Muslims in Germany for the Bertelsmann Stiftung reached a similar conclusion in 2015, finding that their attitudes closely reflected the country’s basic values, such as support for democracy and diversity. The same body of research also found, however, that the widest and most persistent differences were around gender equality and sexual liberalisation, forming the gap that Inglehart and Norris had earlier described as widening into a chasm. The honest conclusion is that most differences narrow with time, while a few, on questions that matter deeply to Western societies, narrow only slowly or hardly at all.

This is precisely the kind of conclusion that polite society has found difficult to debate, and the consequences of that reticence have been serious. When ordinary people raise concerns about the pace of change in their neighbourhoods, or about customs they regard as incompatible with their own, and are told that such concerns are simply racism, two things happen. The concern does not go away, and the person expressing it concludes that the mainstream will not listen, which leaves the field wide open for those who will engage with those issues, regrettably including some who really are racists. Wishful thinking and lofty sentiment are no substitute for reasoned and open debate allied with commitment to feeding the fruits of that process through into policy formulation, and they are no answer at all to many people who are alienated by policies that ignored them in the making.

The most instructive counter-example comes from Denmark, where the Social Democrats under Mette Frederiksen adopted a restrictive approach to immigration after the populist Danish People’s Party took more than a fifth of the vote in 2015. According to an analysis in the New Statesman, Frederiksen’s insight was to separate the argument about migration from arguments about race and culture and to connect it instead with the survival of the Danish welfare state, while continuing to accept her country’s obligations to people fleeing war and persecution. At the next election the populists’ vote halved. The approach is not beyond criticism (critics on the left accused her of borrowing the populists’ narrative), but it demonstrated that a mainstream party can address the preservation of the familiar without abandoning its principles.

Five. Moscow’s wedge

The Kremlin has understood this fissure better than many Western governments, and it has worked to widen it. That is not a conspiracy theory but a matter of record, and the record begins long before Vladimir Putin. The historian Thomas Rid has shown how Soviet intelligence spent decades exploiting the internal divisions of its adversaries, over race, war and inequality, and how its Russian successors have carried the practice into the digital age. The United States Senate’s intelligence committee found that the Internet Research Agency, the St Petersburg operation that targeted American voters in 2016, ran content aimed at audiences across the political spectrum (including pages designed to inflame Black activists), since its purpose was not to support one side but to deepen the quarrel.

The most brazen instrument has been migration itself. In 2021 the Belarusian regime, Moscow’s closest ally, brought tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, to the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, in what the European Union called a hybrid attack in retaliation for sanctions. Polish ministers later accused both the Belarusian and the Russian secret services of organising the flows. In the autumn of 2023 it was Finland’s turn, as nearly a thousand people without visas arrived at its eastern border from Russia, some of them on bicycles in the depths of the northern winter. The Finnish government concluded that Russian authorities were systematically delivering them to the crossings, closed its entire 1,340-kilometre border with Russia and kept it closed. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, observed that Putin and his allies had been using migrants to test Europe’s defences and to destabilise it. Minsk denied orchestrating the crisis of 2021, and the Kremlin denied Finland’s accusation.

The purpose of such operations is not the number of people who cross, which is modest by the standards of Europe’s regular migration, but the effect on the societies that receive them. As CBC News reported at the time, the crisis on Poland’s eastern border deepened divisions that already existed in Polish society, setting those who demanded a tough response against those who opposed one. That is the knife being twisted in a wound that was already open, and it is the same wound, to a greater or lesser degree, in every Western democracy.

Money and propaganda do the rest, although here the evidence must be stated with care. In the United States, the Department of Justice indicted two employees of the Russian state broadcaster RT in September 2024. It alleged that RT had channelled about 9.7 million dollars through shell companies to a Tennessee media firm which paid prominent right-wing commentators (the commentators were not charged, were described as having been deceived about the source of the money, and denied knowing it). In Europe, Czech authorities exposed a Moscow-financed network called Voice of Europe in March 2024. The European Parliament later lifted the immunity of the German AfD politician Petr Bystron so that prosecutors in Munich could continue investigating allegations that he received money from it; he denies the allegations, has not been charged, and calls the investigation politically motivated. Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the country’s presidential election in December 2024, after declassified intelligence described an organised online campaign for the candidate Călin Georgescu attributed to a state actor. Georgescu denies any connection with Russia. He was barred from the rerun and is now on trial in two criminal cases, on charges of promoting fascist and legionary ideas and of complicity in attempted actions against the constitutional order. Since 22 September he has also been under judicial control in a separate fraud investigation. He says he is innocent and calls them political cases. The European Union, for its part, sanctioned seven people and five organisations in July 2023 over the operation known as Doppelganger (the Union calls it RRN), which cloned the websites of respected newspapers to spread propaganda for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The pattern is lopsided: the documented cases of Russian money reaching Western politics involve the populist right far more often than the left, where Moscow’s work consists mainly of amplification rather than proven funding, and some cases have collapsed altogether. In Milan, at the prosecutors’ request, a judge closed the investigation into alleged Russian funding for the Lega without charges in April 2023, since the oil deal was never completed and the Russians involved could not be identified as officials, although she found that its aim had unequivocally been to finance the party. Britain’s National Crime Agency, for its part, said in 2019 that it had received no evidence that Arron Banks or his companies had been funded by any third party for the £8 million in loans behind the Leave.EU campaign.

This produces an uncomfortable paradox, which the argument of this article must face squarely. The concerns that Moscow exploits are real, and the people who hold them are not dupes. Yet some of the loudest voices claiming to speak for them have accepted Russian help, knowingly or otherwise, and every Western leader who dismisses those concerns as illegitimate makes the Kremlin’s task easier. The surest way to deprive Moscow of its wedge is to close the gap into which it is being driven.

Six. The price of not listening

Voters who are not heard go elsewhere, and in 2026 they have been going elsewhere across Europe. France, which gave the world the story of the cake, faces a presidential election in April and May 2027 in which the National Rally begins as the leading force. Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds was upheld by the Paris Court of Appeal in July, but the court set the enforceable part of her ineligibility at fifteen months, a period already served since the first judgment, and she announced her candidacy the same evening. She maintains her innocence and is appealing to the Court of Cassation. Her lawyer noted the presiding judge’s remark about the freedom of voters to have a candidate. Those who argue that elites have used the courts to suppress the popular will should note that the courts, in this case, protected both the rule of law and the voters’ right to choose, and that the decision about Le Pen’s future now rests where it belongs.

In Germany the Christian Democrats have learned the lesson in the harshest way. After the AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt came the elections of 20 September. The AfD won Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with 38.2 per cent and the Social Democrats came a close second with 35.5 per cent, while the Chancellor’s party fell to 4.9 per cent and lost every one of its seats; in Berlin, the Left won with 25.7 per cent against the Christian Democrats’ 18.8 per cent. Merz said his party had been crushed in the polarisation between the Social Democrats and the AfD, which is another way of saying that its voters had left it in both directions at once. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern also shows how difficult the underlying problem is, since a state where, according to Reuters, some 50,000 people of immigrant background work, and which economists warn will need more skilled workers as its population ages, is also a state where hostility to immigration runs strong.

Germany’s institutions have meanwhile been tempted to answer the AfD with prohibition rather than argument. In May 2025 the domestic intelligence service classified the whole party as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, but in February 2026 a court in Cologne barred it, for the time being, from applying that label, finding that anti-democratic efforts existed within the party but could not yet be shown to dominate it. The most telling response came from the Interior Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, a conservative, who said that if the AfD is to go away it should be through competent government rather than a ban. He is right, and his colleagues would do well to listen to him.

Hungary offers the other half of the lesson. In April 2026 Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s longest-serving leader and a close ally of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, was removed from office after sixteen years by Péter Magyar, a former insider whose Tisza party campaigned against corruption and on everyday services such as health care and public transport. That was not a victory for the far right but a victory for listening, won by a centre-right challenger against a national-populist incumbent. Denmark, as we have seen, shows the same thing from the left, although even there the Social Democrats recorded their lowest share of the vote since 1903 in March 2026 (while still finishing first), which suggests that listening must be continuous rather than a single change of policy.

Behind all of these results stands the voter whom every party claims to understand and few actually respect. He is the common man (and she the common woman) whom the Left believes it represents but treats as though he were not smart enough to understand that he is wrong, whom the centre-right regards with barely concealed disdain, and whom, in too many countries, only the far right has troubled to hear. Yes, that guy. He has a vote, and he has been using it.

Seven. The British rehearsal

Britain has already rehearsed one version of this story, and its lessons are more subtle than either side of the Brexit argument usually admits. Immigration was one of the central arguments of the campaign to leave the European Union in 2016, and many who voted to leave believed that doing so would bring migrant numbers down. What followed was the opposite, at least for a time. Net migration from the European Union did fall, and has been negative since the middle of 2022. Migration from the rest of the world, however, rose far faster, driven by work and study visas under the new points-based system and by humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians and for Hong Kong’s British nationals, so that total immigration peaked at an estimated 1.47 million in the year to March 2023. Keir Starmer, as Prime Minister, later blamed his predecessors for what he called a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’.

Nor did legally leaving Europe physically stop the boats transiting the English Channel. Small-boat crossings of the Channel, which numbered a few hundred when records began in 2018, reached a record of about 46,000 in 2022 and were still running at about 41,000 in 2025, with the cumulative total passing 200,000 in May 2026 (roughly two-thirds of them under Conservative governments and one-third under Labour). Britain, moreover, left the European Union’s Dublin system for returning asylum seekers to other member states at the end of 2020, although returns under that system had been few.

Only when ministers chose to restrict the new routes, from late 2023 under the Conservatives and from 2025 under Labour, did the numbers fall, with net migration estimated at 171,000 in 2025, the lowest level since early 2021. (These official estimates are revised heavily and often, and the figure for 2024 has already been cut from 431,000 to 331,000.) The lesson is therefore more precise than the claim that Brexit failed. Leaving the European Union moved control of immigration to Westminster, and for three years the people holding the controls delivered the opposite of what many Leave voters had expected, which is the thesis of this article in miniature. The rise of Reform UK, which won more than 1,400 council seats in May 2026, was the predictable result.

The economic cost has been real as well. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent forecaster, estimates that leaving the European Union will reduce Britain’s long-run productivity by about 4 per cent compared with remaining, with trade some 15 per cent lower, although the estimate is disputed by economists sympathetic to Brexit and is complicated by the pandemic and the energy shock. Political self-harm, in other words, becomes economic self-harm, and the harm is felt most by the people who were promised relief.

Eight. How it ends badly

The danger of ignoring voters is not only that governments lose elections, which is how democracy is supposed to work, but that the people who replace them may not intend to give power back. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have described how democracies are now more often dismantled from within, by elected leaders who capture the courts, the media and the electoral machinery, than overthrown by generals. Hungary under Orbán became the European case study. In September 2022 the European Parliament voted by 433 to 123 that Hungary had become a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy, concluding that a member state of the Union could no longer be considered a full democracy. In Poland, the Law and Justice government of 2015 to 2023 took control of the constitutional tribunal and the public broadcaster before losing power at the ballot box.

Extremists who answer real grievances, in other words, can use the mandate those grievances give them to build power that outlasts the grievances themselves, and that ends badly for elites and ordinary people alike. The elites lose their positions and sometimes their liberty, while ordinary people lose the very freedom to change their minds that made the populist victory possible in the first place.

There is a wider risk as well. After Britain’s experience, most of Europe’s populist parties quietly abandoned their demands to leave the European Union and the euro, preferring to capture and reshape the Union from within (the AfD, which has repeatedly written the possibility of a German exit into its programmes, is the conspicuous exception). That is less dramatic than an exit but potentially more corrosive, since a Union whose governments no longer trust one another can be paralysed without anyone leaving it. Europe’s history offers little comfort about what follows when old rivalries and resentments are allowed to revive, and while nobody can say how likely such a descent would be, the economic damage would come first and the political damage is unlikely to end there.

The warning therefore cuts both ways. Leaders who refuse to listen create the conditions in which extremists flourish, and voters who reward extremists may find that they have exchanged governments that did not listen for governments that cannot be removed.

Nine. Democracy’s secret sauce

What, then, distinguishes a democracy from its imitations? The philosopher Karl Popper gave the most useful answer. Democracy, he argued, is not the rule of the majority as such but a system under which the ruled can dismiss their rulers without bloodshed, for example by means of a general election. That is the secret sauce of democracy, and it always has been, since it turns what would elsewhere be revolutions into routine events, so that political elites who stop listening to the will of the people are given time in retirement to ponder why they are no longer in power. Hungary proved in April that the mechanism still works, even in a system tilted against the challenger.

Autocracies lack this release, and the pressure that democracies vent at the ballot box accumulates instead beneath a surface of apparent calm. The economist Timur Kuran has explained why their collapses so often come as a surprise. People who live under repression hide their true preferences, so that nobody (the rulers included) knows how many others share their discontent until some small event reveals it, whereupon support for the regime can evaporate with astonishing speed, as it did across Eastern Europe in 1989. The Assad regime in Syria, which held elections of its own and relied on Russian protection, collapsed within days in December 2024, and its leader fled to Moscow. Russia glimpsed its own fragility in June 2023, when the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin marched on Moscow and the state’s defences appeared, for a day, to melt away. This site has documented a smaller example of the same brittleness in the case of a state economist who was tolerated for three months while his warnings were read only by specialists, and dismissed within forty-eight hours once ordinary Russians heard about them.

Russia’s parliamentary election of 18 to 20 September 2026 showed the facade at its most elaborate. According to the Central Election Commission, whose figures can only be reported as claims, the ruling United Russia party won about 58 per cent of the party-list vote on a turnout of 59.68 per cent, the highest it has claimed since 2011. On the latest projections from those figures, that gives the party at least 347 of the 450 seats, the largest majority in its history, and the commission is due to confirm the final result on 25 September. Yabloko, the only registered party opposed to the war, had been removed from the national ballot, no observers had been invited from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and Golos, the independent monitor that had documented electoral violations since 2000, had been forced to close in 2025 after its co-chair was jailed. It was the first Duma election held in the occupied parts of the four Ukrainian regions that Russia claims to have annexed in 2022 (occupied Crimea has taken part since 2016), and the European Union responded by refusing to recognise the voting in any occupied territory, promising sanctions against those involved and describing the continued and deepening erosion of democracy in Russia. Kaja Kallas, the Union’s foreign policy chief, concluded that only an imitation of democracy remained.

The allegations of fraud are already accumulating, although it will take days or weeks before their accuracy can be cross-checked against other sources. The independent outlet Meduza, relaying figures from the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit, reported that by noon on the first day of voting in Moscow a hundred times as many people had voted online as in 2021, while polling stations had recorded no turnout at all. The investigative outlet Important Stories reported residents of the Altai region being placed on lists for home voting without having asked, and even the Communist Party, the officially tolerated opposition, complained that voters were being pressed to register for online voting. Important Stories also found that on the first day more than 4,500 polling stations processed ballots at three or more times the normal rate, which it said may indicate ballot stuffing. A political strategist working with the Presidential Administration was blunter still, telling Meduza that which parties enter the Duma is decided personally by Putin.

The contrast with Germany could hardly have been more stark. On the same Sunday that voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern threw the Chancellor’s party out of their state parliament, Russia’s ruling party was declared to have won its largest majority ever. One of those systems is under visible strain, and its politicians are frightened, while the other appears serene. Only one of them, however, has a way of letting the pressure out. Nobody knows when the brittleness in Moscow will break, but history suggests that where democracy is faked the break tends to come suddenly and violently, and without the courtesy of an election.