Is Europe Signaling the End of Democracy and the Delayed Arrival of the Last Man?

With western democracies increasingly turning away from democratic principles and trying to silence the voices of the people, the struggle for recognition will rage on.

Back in 1992 on the heels of the Cold War’s end, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote the book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which he posited that the history was settled on which form of government was best for humanity. Fukuyama argued liberal democracy was that evolved form. Fukuyama never claimed chronological history or events would end. Many have misunderstood Fukuyama’s central claim regarding liberal democracy by citing the rise of radial Islam and the devastating wars it heralded, as well as China’s socialist market economy, as proof that Fukuyama was wrong—that history had indeed not ended. Fukuyama specifically noted other ideologies would arise, but, like communism and socialism, none would ultimately defeat liberal democracy as the best form of government in which man secured his right for recognition as an individual with God-given rights.

I raise Fukuyama’s claim because I think it has more significance today than it did back in the 1990s. Why? Because it appears the world’s western liberal democracies and their political leaders are increasingly uncomfortable with the results of the liberal democratic process. We have entered a phase in the West in which the elites in our societies are trying to disenfranchise large numbers of citizens because those citizens want different leaders. Let me explain.

First, in November 2023, voters in the Netherlands gave Geert Wilders and his populist Party for Freedom a plurality in parliamentary elections. After decades walling off Wilders from joining a coalition government, the size of his victory made that effort untenable. The cordon sanitaire came crashing down. For those wondering what a cordon sanitaire is, it is defined as “a guarded line preventing anyone from leaving an area infected by a disease and thus spreading it.” European elites, therefore, see leaders and parties they don’t like as infectious diseases. So sophisticated. Regardless, it took eight months of political wrangling to finally reach an agreement. The deal with other political parties to form a coalition government with Wilders prohibited him from serving as Prime Minister.

Next, in France last month, a court convicted Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Rally, of embezzlement and went the additional step of banning her from running in the presidential election in 2027. Currently, National Rally is leading in the polls. Le Pen is appealing the ruling. If she fails, French men and women will be prohibited from voting for her—though I suspect the ruling has made the National Rally more popular with the people.

Also in March in Romania, the frontrunner in the presidential vote was barred from running in the election this month. The ruling came from Romania’s Electoral Bureau based on populist Calin Georgescu’s “failure to comply with the electoral regulations.” The "decision came just over a week after Romanian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Georgescu, accusing him of crimes such as attempting to subvert the constitutional order and establishing a fascist organization.” This largely boils down to more Russian web ads. Sound familiar?

In Germany, the elites are seeking to ban the populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) from ever being part of a governing coalition. In a shock move two weeks ago, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic intelligence agency) classified AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group. This decision comes just months after AfD became the second leading political party in Germany when it secured 20.8% of the vote in the federal election. Look closely at the map of the February election results. Notice anything familiar about the parts of Germany in which AfD won a majority? It is literally as if it is 1989 and Germany is still divided into West Germany (haves) and East Germany (have nots).

Finally, last week in the United Kingdom (UK), Nigel Farage and the populist Reform Party stormed to major wins in local elections when it won 677 out of 1,600 seats. The Reform Party is on the cusp of winning a general election that would install Farage as Prime Minister. Farage already succeeded at getting BREXIT passed by the people in 2016. One can only imagine what the elites in the UK will do in the coming months to stop Farage from leading the UK. If the Netherlands, France, Romania, and Germany are any indication, it will be a full-on assault as we have experienced in America vis-a-vis Donald Trump.

Did you notice anything consistent and vaguely familiar across the five European countries discussed above? You should have. In all cases, the parties being attacked by the elites are populist parties and, in all cases, the elites, including deep state entities and the courts, are using government and lawfare to take out their primary opponents. Billionaire George Soros and his minions are moving across the globe to stop the people from having a say in who they are ruled by and how they are ruled. Soros et al. want centralized progressive governments unshackled by constitutions and laws no different than the totalitarian governments in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

One year ago, I wrote a column, “Why Does the Global Left Hate Democracy?," in which I stated:

The American Left’s opposition to the People’s will largely began during the Progressive Era under President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson believed that the Constitution was an impediment to the enlightened endpoint pushed by progressives. Progressives believed that countries should not be run via the democratic ideas of bicameralism and presentment; rather, progressives believed countries should be run by an elite group of experts who know what is good for the masses. The undesirables of a country should be eliminated based on eugenic principles, which is why Planned Parenthood pushed for abortions of segments of society, including minorities. The tragic result of Wilsonian progressivism and the eugenics movement was Adolph Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish problem via the gas chambers, which also targeted undesirables like the elderly, disabled, gays, and gypsies.

Fast forward eighty years and the talk of deplorables by the Left once again darkens our society. Just like the Nazis did in pre-war Germany by blaming Jews for the woes of society and increasingly alienating Jews from normal society, the Left targets MAGA Republicans by recklessly accusing them of Christian nationalism (I’m still unclear as to what this is and to whom it actually applies), white supremacy (despite my travels all across Ohio I still haven’t stumbled on these folks), insurrection (read: people protesting democratic election laws that they believed had NOT been followed), and terrorism (somehow people the Left thinks are morons are capable of planning a sophisticated terrorist plot involving millions of MAGA Republicans without any evidence or indictments to support the claim).

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The attack on political opponents isn’t just happening in America. Across Europe, the Left is doing everything it can to push the political parties favored by strong segments of each country to the fringe, or, in some cases, eliminating those parties from elections.

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As Joel Kotkin recently pointed out in his excellent column, “The Coming Revolt Against Woke Capitalism":

Virtually every ideology that’s undermining the West has its patrons in these ruling cognitive elites. This includes everything from the purveyors of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter to transgender activists and, perhaps most egregiously, campaigners for the climate jihad. In each case, these elite activists reject the market traditions of liberal capitalism and instead promote a form of social control, often with themselves in charge. The fact that these ideologies are destructive, and could ultimately undermine the status of these very elites, seems to matter little to them. That they also infuriate the middle and working classes doesn’t seem to register, either.

The Global Left believes it has a fundamental right to govern that shouldn’t be deterred by pesky uneducated voters who simply don’t know what is good for them. “Our Democracy” simply must be protected from democracy itself. Don’t you get that?

Things have only gotten much worse in the last year, as detailed above. J.D. Vance echoed my thoughts about Europe’s slide away from democratic principles in his February 15, 2025, Munich speech. Vance stated:

Now to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.

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You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.

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And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. It is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box. I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process, protects nothing. In fact, it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy.

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But what no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.

Europeans, the people, have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future. You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree.

It goes without saying that I find Neo-Nazis and fascists as repugnant as European elites do, but I also find socialists, communists, and ecoterrorists unpalatable, too. Democracy is ugly, so sometimes people vote for candidates and parties that are distasteful and, at times, shocking. That doesn’t mean, however, those candidates, parties, and their voters should be banned, tossed aside, ignored, jailed, or walled off from governing by the elites and losers who the voters just rejected. Those actions are antidemocratic and cause greater disenchantment and unrest among the populace.

Those antidemocratic actions come on top of the already antidemocratic reality in Europe that their citizens are governed by an entity—the European Union (EU)—that has never been voted on or approved by the people. As the EU gobbles up more competencies (i.e., powers) originally left to the purview of Member States, Europeans increasingly find themselves governed by elites in Brussels and Strasbourg, as their voices at home are silenced because they are voting for candidates and parties boxed out by the elite. This one-two punch leaves them holding an empty bag full of gripes, sleights, and outright slaps in the face, especially as the elites allow millions of illegal immigrants from hostile foreign countries with antidemocratic beliefs to pour into their countries.

This toxic brew won’t end well.

In America, for eight years, the progressive Left and their media sycophants did everything they could to centralize power in Washington, D.C., and persecute their political opponents in the name of saving “our Democracy.” They curtailed free speech rights; violated due process; weakened our national sovereignty; weaponized law enforcement, intelligence, and the courts; and undermined the voting process to ensure victory. They spent four years trying to undo the 2016 election then the next four years trying to put populist Donald Trump in jail so he couldn’t run let alone win the 2024 election. How antidemocratic means justified their end goal to save our democracy never added up unless democracy is defined as democrat-controlled progressive government, which of course isn’t democracy at all. It is called one-party rule by any means necessary no different than what Vladimir Putin, Nicholas Maduro, and other dictators do to get and keep control.

This is not a perfect analogy, but it is close enough. With the creation of the EU and its ever-growing control of Europe, the EU has become like America’s federal government, with Member States similar to U.S. states. European elites, like U.S. elites, want power and control centralized in the EU like it is in Washington, D.C. Just as the U.S. states have lost power following the Progressive Era in the 1930s when so many traditional state powers were grabbed by Franklin Roosevelt and his congresses and sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court after his court-packing threat in 1936, European counties have had more and more of their competencies curtailed and taken by the EU and sanctioned by the various EU courts. As in the U.S., the rise of populist parties and leaders in Europe along with their protests represent the people’s response to this loss of power and control over their lives.

The only reason BREXIT in the UK and Trump and his MAGA movement won control before similar movements succeeded in continental Europe is because both countries gave voters a say in one mass vote—the BREXIT vote in the UK and the presidential elections in America. When Europeans have had similar opportunities to vote en masse, they have twice rejected more of a centralized Europe. Specifically, back in 2005, both France and the Netherlands allowed citizens to vote on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. In France, 54% rejected the treaty; in the Netherlands, 64% said, “No thank you!” The elites never allowed another vote on centralized Europe to occur again, as they knew it would keep losing. Instead, the elites used cordon sanitaire to marginalize and exclude populist parties from governing while siphoning more power from Member States to the EU. This approach has worked brilliantly.

Until now.

More and more Europeans are seeing through the veil pulled over their eyes by the elites, amplified by the mass immigration of illiberal non-Europeans who are fundamentally changing what it means to be Europe and European. As a result, populist parties are rising higher and higher in country after country, as those parties are focused on reasserting their lost sovereignty, stopping the flood of hostile immigrants, and strengthening their security apparatuses. TIPP Insights editorial board summed it up nicely:

Berlin once stood for freedom. Now it stands for lawfare. In 1963, JFK came to Berlin to support a city surrounded by tyranny. Today, Germany is using its own courts to crush opposition parties like AfD. The excuse is extremism. The real reason is fear. Lawfare has become the tool of choice for elites who can’t win with voters, so they go after rivals with judges instead. This isn’t democracy. It’s control dressed up in legal robes.

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Democracy's promise shines brightest when vibrant political parties engage in robust policy debates, creating a dynamic system that reflects diverse voices and fosters accountable governance. Diverse parties ensure that a spectrum of perspectives—economic, social, and cultural—are voiced. From progressive to conservative, urban to rural, parties channel citizen priorities into the political arena, preventing marginalization and giving voters meaningful choices.

Germany and France have conveniently veered away from democracy's promise.

Anyone who tracks happenings in Europe has seen these dark clouds coming. I certainly did.

Back in May 2014, I predicted the success of BREXIT after doing a fact-finding mission that took me to several European counties. Here is what I wrote in “Special Report: European Disunion—The European Union Parliamentary Elections and Russia’s [FIRST] Invasion of Ukraine: The Beginning of the End of the EU and NATO?”:

We made stops in London, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Paris where we talked extensively with Members of Parliament, policy leaders, members of the media, and academia, engaging with leaders from across the political spectrum. We received candid feedback from virtually every speaker, including from individuals traditionally hesitant to engage publicly.

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Many Europeans already express concerns over the legitimacy of the EU given its lack of true democratic mechanism. It also will be crystal clear that there is most definitely not support for an EU defense force or an EU foreign policy. In conjunction with this stall on national security issues, the EU fiscal restraints and immigration policies will continue to negatively impact many Member States, especially if another global recession hits in the near future.

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The fundamental problem in the EU is that it really boils down to an all or nothing enterprise. As they say, you can’t be “half-pregnant.” Either the EU will become a federated United States of Europe, which most people see as highly unlikely, or it will collapse under its own weight. Each EU Member State wrestles with issues unique to its current state. For southern countries, the Euro restrains them from devaluing their currencies to reduce the enormous debts they carry. With high levels of debt, attracting foreign investment and spurring entrepreneurship become high hurdles. For northern countries, open borders increases social costs and undermines the employment opportunities and wages of citizens. This leads to higher levels of animosity and discrimination as older citizens see their wages fall or work being given to “cheaper immigrants.” The over forty-five year-old northern European who played by the rules feels betrayed when he faces long-term unemployment. It also reopens long-held stereotypes about southern and eastern Europeans, especially when Greeks protest for more generous benefits and organized crime elements from the east establish operations in western European countries.

In some cases, the actions by the EU Court of Human Rights to invalidate laws passed by national assemblies on issues such as terrorism and the voting rights of prisoners is seen as a direct attack on a nation’s sovereignty and security.

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As our friends across the Atlantic look at what has become of the federalization and centralization of power in America, they see dysfunction, government run amok, and widespread dissatisfaction with Washington, D.C. It is unlikely they will follow us by willingly giving more power to Brussels. Instead, they will seek to take back some of what the EU has taken.

The populist parties want desperately to take back what the EU has taken, but elites across Europe are stopping them. The political temperature across Europe is rising with each step the elites take to quash populism.

More recently, on a trip last Summer to Europe, I wrote about my observations in “Thoughts from Europe re the West’s Past and Future”:

First, like the influx of Central and South Americans to America over the last few years, I was stunned at the number of people from Africa and the Middle East in both countries. In talking to locals, it is a controversial issue that is driving populist parties across Europe to election wins, as we just saw with the European Union (EU) Parliament elections two weeks ago. In the Netherlands, after two decades of applying a cordon sanitaire (walling him off from being in a governing coalition) to controversial populist Geert Wilders (the Dutch Donald Trump), his parties large election win six months ago resulted in the wall falling down, with him forming a coalition government recently. We may see the same outcome in France with Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party. Donald Trump’s appeal in America partially comes from a similar angst among the voters re illegal immigration.

One of the most mindblowing visuals occurred one night when walking through the Red Light District (the place made famous by the “red lights” of prostitutes), we passed many Muslim husbands and wives, with the wives covered head-to-toe. I don’t have an issue with them dressing that way; rather, I was surprised to see them walking in that area of Amsterdam, which I thought would be highly offensive to them. I guess it wasn’t.

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Finally, one shocking event that occurred was when anti-Semitic/pro-Palestinian protestors in boats motored by the Anne Frank House shouting their vile messages. It is one thing to hold a protest in Dam Square (the main pubic square in Amsterdam), but to do so in front of a house that tells the story of the Jewish Frank family is repugnant. It was an intentional act intended to upset visitors to the museum. It also was deeply disrespectful of the Frank legacy given that all members of the family except Anne’s father, Otto, died in Nazi concentration camps after being discovered hiding in the house. They had hid for over two years in the house before being found and shipped to Auschwitz to be murdered. Pushing anti-Semitic/pro-Palestinian views at that house was just repulsive.

In the months after I made these observations, anti-Semitic hoards attacked Jews after a soccer match in Amsterdam and other acts of violence have occurred there and in other countries. Here, we have terrorist gangs from Venezuela; in Europe, they have angry radicalized Muslims from the Middle East. It appears Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" is underway.

Where do we go from here?

We come to the Last Man, or, in the spirit of Fukuyama, the delay of the arrival of the Last Man. Fukuyama’s Last Man arrives when liberal democracy provides for all of us to be recognized as the supermen we are. With western democracies increasingly turning away from democratic principles and ideals and trying to silence the voices of the people via stopping those who they vote for from governing, the struggle for recognition will rage on. The elites will continue to try to rule us with decreasing support and legitimacy using the decaying vestiges of centralized progressive entities, as the growing masses look to populism and populist parties to not just protect them from the elites and the collateral damage they cause by their faux do-gooderism, but also to finally give them the recognition they deserve via the restoration of authentic liberal democracy.

P.S. For those keeping track, U.S. News and World Report just released their 2025 Best States ranking. Ohio dropped two more spots to #38 after being ranked #36 in 2024. After fourteen straight years of Republican governors and Republican supermajority legislatures, Ohio continues to lose ground to the other states. Will Ohio’s next governor adopt the bold color Reaganesque agenda Ohio desperately needs, or acquiesce to the status quo nibbling on the margins agenda that hasn’t and won’t turn Ohio’s fortunes around? For our kids and grandkids, let’s pray it is the former.