The Right Isn’t the Cause. It’s the Symptom of a Deeper Crisis

Why are we so afraid of the political right when the real crisis came first?

Across Europe, right-wing parties are gaining ground. Governments are changing, political alliances are shifting, and commentators warn about nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism.

But I am not particularly afraid of the rise of the right.

Not because it is harmless. Not because elections don't matter.

Because the right is not the cause. It is the consequence.

Its rise reflects deeper economic, social, and geopolitical failures that were already underway. Confusing the effect with the cause is like looking at a fever and blaming the thermometer.

A Narrative in Crisis

For decades, Europe lived inside a reassuring story.

Globalization would bring prosperity. Free markets would create efficiency. European integration would guarantee stability. Economic interdependence would make major wars increasingly unthinkable. Western alliances would keep us safe.

Then reality intervened.

Ukraine. The Middle East. Energy prices. Inflation. Rearmament. Stagnation.

The war in Ukraine exposed Europe's dependence on a fragile energy system. After abandoning Russian gas, Europe faced dramatically higher energy costs.

Whatever one's position on the war, the lesson is unavoidable:

Geopolitical decisions have economic consequences, and ordinary people eventually pay the bill.

Then came the Middle East.

The war following October 7, 2023, brought another conflict to the center of global politics. The widening confrontation in the Persian Gulf has added another layer of uncertainty to an already unstable system.

This is no longer just about war.

It is about energy, economics, social stability—and whether Western societies can absorb another major shock.

Europe Is Getting More Fragile

There is a contradiction at the heart of today's Europe.

Governments struggle to preserve living standards while committing more resources to defense. They talk about fiscal discipline and spending restraint while preparing for years of higher military budgets.

The argument for rearmament is straightforward: Europe must be able to defend itself.

Fair enough.

But there is another question.

What happens when societies spend years filling arsenals with weapons?

Military power can deter war. It can also magnify the consequences of miscalculation, escalation, or political failure.

The issue is not simply who has the weapons.

It is the kind of world we are building by accumulating them.

We Have Become Fragile

There is another vulnerability that receives far less attention.

The Italian psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli wrote extensively about what he called the "fragile man." I would broaden the idea.

It isn't only men.

Human beings have become fragile.

Western societies have spent decades becoming accustomed to comfort, security, instant availability, and predictability.

We are not accustomed to deprivation. To waiting. To doing without.

Earlier generations knew scarcity in ways we can barely imagine.

For them, the problem might have been finding enough food.

For us, it can be losing a cellphone signal.

That sounds trivial.

It isn't.

Prosperity gives us comfort, but it also creates dependence on comfort. The more a society takes normality for granted, the harder it is to absorb its sudden disappearance.

We Are Not Ready for a Long War

Modern conflicts have exposed another weakness.

For years, we convinced ourselves that war could be quick, technological, precise, and decisive. Superior weapons would produce superior outcomes.

Afghanistan should have cured us of that illusion.

Twenty years of Western intervention ended with the departure from Kabul and the return of the Taliban.

The lesson was not simply military. It was psychological.

A society accustomed to prosperity and security struggles to sustain a conflict when victory is neither quick nor certain.

And that vulnerability becomes far greater when the enemy can strike back.

We are accustomed to thinking of war as something that happens somewhere else.

What happens when it doesn't?

What Happens When the Lights Go Out?

Imagine a genuine global war—not a distant conflict, but a confrontation between major powers capable of striking each other's territory.

What would they target?

Military bases. Command centers. Communications. Transportation.

And energy infrastructure.

Because destroying electricity means attacking the nervous system of modern civilization.

No power means crippled telecommunications, failed payment systems, disrupted computer networks, impaired water systems, stalled fuel distribution, broken supply chains, and hospitals forced onto backup generators.

The smartphone in your hand could become little more than a piece of glass and metal.

Italy experienced a warning in 2003, when a massive blackout left almost the entire country without electricity.

That was 2003.

There were no smartphones in everyone's pocket. Digital payments were nowhere near as pervasive. Our dependence on permanent connectivity was nothing like it is today.

Now it is 2026.

Imagine that blackout lasting days instead of hours.

And imagine that it wasn't an accident.

Imagine it was deliberate.

That is when we would rediscover something we have forgotten:

technology does not free us from physical reality. It makes us more dependent on it.

So Why Is the Right Winning?

This is why I see the rise of the right as a secondary phenomenon.

When people become poorer, more frightened, and less secure, they look for someone who promises to restore control.

The right understands this instinctively.

Immigration.

Borders.

Sovereignty.

Order.

Identity.

Enemies.

Simple answers are powerful when people are afraid.

But they do not necessarily address the forces producing that fear.

They can capture anger. Turn anxiety into votes. Give people someone to blame.

They cannot, by themselves, repair the economic and geopolitical structures underneath the crisis.

And the political center and left have their own problem: they often warn about the right without convincingly explaining why millions of people have become receptive to it.

That is the real political vacuum.

The right may offer simplistic answers, but at least it offers answers.

Its opponents too often offer explanations without a compelling alternative.

The Problem Is the Model

This brings us to the uncomfortable question.

For decades, much of the West embraced the idea that markets should regulate an ever-larger share of economic and social life.

Government intervention was reduced. Economic planning became suspect. Redistribution was treated as a distortion. Efficiency became the supreme virtue.

But a country is not a corporation.

And a society is not a marketplace.

When crisis arrives, we remember what the market cannot guarantee on its own.

Energy.

Water.

Healthcare.

Transportation.

Industrial capacity.

Strategic reserves.

Infrastructure.

Food security.

These are not merely economic assets. They are the foundations of national resilience.

This is where Keynes inevitably returns to the conversation.

Not as a relic of the twentieth century, but as a question:

Can a modern society really entrust its survival entirely to the invisible hand of the market?

The answer should not be ideological.

The real question is practical:

Where does the market work—and where must society retain the capacity to plan, protect, and prepare?

The Crisis Beneath the Elections

That is why the rise of the right does not frighten me nearly as much as the conditions producing it.

If Europe becomes poorer, energy remains structurally expensive, rearmament becomes permanent, wars spread, and economic insecurity deepens, the right will continue to find fertile ground.

Changing governments won't be enough.

Changing parties won't be enough.

Changing leaders won't be enough.

A structural crisis cannot be solved by changing the occupants of the palace.

The conditions themselves have to change.

And perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

We obsess over elections, polls, parties, leaders, and social media.

But what if the more important question is much simpler?

How resilient would our society be if tomorrow we lost the things we now take for granted?

Electricity.

The internet.

Electronic payments.

Fuel.

Logistics.

Heating.

Instant access to goods.

Security.

Peace.

A civilization is not truly strong because it possesses extraordinary technology.

It is strong when it can survive without it.

We have built an extraordinarily sophisticated civilization.

But sophistication is not the same thing as resilience.

And if the arsenals we are filling today ever have to be emptied, the question may not simply be:

Who won the war?

It may be:

How long can we survive when the lights don't come back on?

Remigration: When a Word Should Alarm Europe

History's greatest tragedies do not begin with massacres.

They begin with words.

Words change the way a society sees part of itself. They redefine who belongs and who is viewed as an outsider. That is why the growing use of the term "remigration" in European political discourse should concern everyone, regardless of political affiliation.

Before asking whether such a policy is feasible, we should first ask what it actually means.

Remigration—for whom?

Listening to much of Europe's emerging right-wing rhetoric, the answer appears increasingly clear. The issue is not immigration as such. Immigrants from China, India, or Latin America are rarely presented as the central problem. Instead, the focus overwhelmingly falls on people from Muslim-majority countries. The debate, therefore, is no longer simply about immigration; it is about an alleged incompatibility between Islam and Western civilization.

Europe undeniably faces serious integration challenges. Pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Across the continent there are neighborhoods marked by social exclusion, crime, religious radicalization, unemployment, and the failure of integration policies. Ignoring these realities only strengthens political extremism.

But acknowledging these problems is fundamentally different from treating millions of people as a single, inherently suspect group.

This is where history deserves our attention.

In 1940, Nazi Germany developed the so-called Madagascar Plan, a proposal to deport Europe's Jewish population to the island of Madagascar, effectively treating an entire people as a geographical problem to be removed. The plan proved unworkable for military and logistical reasons. It was later abandoned, and the regime ultimately implemented the "Final Solution," leading to the systematic murder of six million Jews.

Mentioning this episode is not to suggest that contemporary advocates of remigration pursue the same objectives as the Nazi regime. Such a comparison would be historically inaccurate. Rather, it serves as a reminder of a broader lesson: whenever societies begin discussing entire groups of people primarily in terms of removal rather than as individuals with rights, responsibilities, and human dignity, they enter dangerous territory.

History offers other warnings.

In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population. More than a century later, it expelled the Moriscos—Muslims who had converted to Christianity. The goal was to create a religiously homogeneous kingdom. The result was immense human suffering and the loss of valuable economic, scientific, and cultural contributions.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey carried out a compulsory population exchange based almost entirely on religion. More than one and a half million people were forced from their homes. It was presented as a permanent solution to ethnic conflict, yet it left deep scars that endured for generations.

In 1947, the Partition of India triggered one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed newly drawn borders in opposite directions. The promise was peace through separation. The outcome was mass violence, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees.

More recently, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Europe witnessed how rapidly multiethnic societies could collapse into brutality. Nationalist rhetoric transformed neighbors into enemies. Ethnic and religious identities became markers of exclusion, persecution, and murder. The Srebrenica genocide remains one of the darkest reminders of how quickly coexistence can unravel.

None of these historical episodes proves that today's Europe is destined to repeat the past. History never repeats itself in exactly the same way.

But it does teach one enduring lesson: societies rarely descend into violence overnight. They get there gradually—through polarization, fear, simplistic narratives, and the progressive dehumanization of those perceived as "the other."

That is what should concern us.

The real danger lies not in a single word but in the simultaneous failure of two opposing approaches.

On one side, immigration that is too often poorly managed, with inadequate border control and unsuccessful integration policies.

On the other, the temptation to answer these failures with slogans that promise the removal of entire communities as though complex social problems could be solved through mass exclusion.

Both approaches feed extremism.

Both deepen fear.

Both weaken the foundations of democratic coexistence.

Europe deserves better.

It needs effective border management, orderly migration policies, clear distinctions between those who have the legal right to remain and those who do not, meaningful integration for those willing to embrace democratic values, and lawful, case-by-case deportation of individuals who have no legal right to stay or who commit serious crimes.

That is the essence of the rule of law: judging people by what they do, not by who they are.

The real question, then, is not whether "remigration" is an effective political slogan.

The real question is whether Europe intends to confront migration with serious, rational, and lawful policies—or whether it will allow the debate to degenerate into a clash of collective identities.

European history does not tell us that the worst is inevitable.

It does remind us, however, that the worst becomes possible when politics stops solving problems and starts dividing humanity into categories deemed incapable of living together.

And that is why a single word can sometimes become the beginning of something far more dangerous.