There is a red thread linking the chronicles of these days, from Berlin to Bucharest, from London to Paris: it is the repressive grip with which the European establishment is desperately trying to stop the sovereignist wave growing from below, fuelled by the frustration and awareness of millions of citizens.
We are no longer faced with simple political differences: what is happening before our eyes is a true authoritarian drift, disguised as a defence of democracy. A tragic and grotesque contradiction. For while the elites invoke the rule of law, they trample it underfoot. While they speak of freedom, they imprison dissent. While they call themselves anti-fascists, they impose a single thought that has all the features of a new ideological totalitarianism.
In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has branded the AfD – a party voted for by 21% of Germans in the last federal elections – as a ‘right-wing extremist organisation’. A heavy label, which allows the government to spy on, intercept and infiltrate a legitimate opposition. A move that is unprecedented in the recent history of democratic Germany and that made even overseas jump in their seats: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of ‘tyranny masquerading as democracy’, Vice-President JD Vance denounced the symbolic reconstruction of the Berlin Wall, no longer at the hands of the Soviets, but of German bureaucrats.
This is the level of the clash: a growing part of the West is beginning to open its eyes to what is happening in Europe, where those who win elections without the approval of the establishment are shot down, discredited, silenced.
The same script is being repeated in France, where Marine Le Pen has been convicted and declared ineligible, despite representing millions of French citizens. Her ‘crime’? Having dared to challenge the system, becoming a candidate too inconvenient for the oligarchy that runs Europe from Brussels.
In Romania, after the surprise victory of Călin Georgescu – immediately neutralised on charges of alleged Russian interference – today it is George Simion’s turn to pick up the baton and lead the democratic revolt of the Romanian people. A young leader, born from below, who has put at the centre of his campaign the issues that the elite shuns like the plague: identity, sovereignty, work.
And he did so with the courage of one who knows he is speaking on behalf of an entire nation. The fact that he calls himself ideologically close to the MAGA movement is no coincidence: it is the same battle, the same fault line, the same clash between people and power.
In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has exceeded all limits: hundreds of arrests for crimes of opinion, for posts published on social networks. A liberticidal madness that would have put even Orwell to shame. Yet not even this repression was enough to stop the advance of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which won symbolic but powerful victories in the recent local elections, standing as a true alternative to a political system that is increasingly self-referential, increasingly distant from people’s real lives.
What do these episodes have in common? A simple truth: the European establishment is afraid. It is afraid of losing control, it is afraid that citizens will stop believing its lies, it is afraid that the long wave of democratic rebellion will sweep away its strongholds built on manipulated consensus. So it represses. It censors. It excludes. Disqualifies. It cancels elections. It arrests. It labels those who dissent as ‘fascist’, ‘extremist’, ‘dangerous’, in a desperate attempt to stop a change that appears increasingly inevitable. But it does not work. On the contrary, every abuse of power fuels popular anger, strengthens the opposition, and makes the hypocrisy of those who preach democracy while practising censorship even more visible.
Today Europe is at a crossroads. It can choose to go back to listening to the peoples, to give a voice to those who for years have been demanding real answers on immigration, work, security, identity. Or it can continue to entrench itself in a hysterical defence of the system, pushing millions of citizens towards the only path left: democratic rebellion.
Farage, Simion, Weidel are not the problem: they are the answer to a problem that the establishment refuses to acknowledge. The game is open. But if history has a lesson to offer, it is that people do not allow themselves to be trampled on forever. And that sooner or later, even the most arrogant of powers must come to terms with those it has forgotten for too long: the people.
