Why the Political Immune System Targets the European Right
Lately, I’ve been asking myself a question—not from the position of outrage or loyalty to any party, but from a place of quiet observation.
Why does the political system in Europe react so forcefully, so reflexively, to right-wing populist parties?
This question returned to me after the sentencing of a high-profile political figure: a suspended prison term, a political ban, and the unmistakable undertone—this line you were not supposed to cross.
I am not here to speak for them, or against them.
What interests me is the pattern that connects.
Because this is not new.
We’ve seen it before.
The pattern behaves like a body encountering a foreign agent—one that feels threatening to the internal order. It doesn’t argue. It attacks.
And so I began to wonder: is this the immune response of a political system?
A system not defending its principles, but its structure?
Here is what I’ve come to understand—not as a conclusion, but as a map.
1. The Postwar Immune Memory
The post-1945 European order was not just a reconstruction of roads and laws. It was a moral recalibration.
Nationalism, racial identity, and authoritarianism became not just political errors—they became moral infections.
The EU was designed as a vaccine.
Supranational institutions, open borders, shared identity—all meant to inoculate the continent from its own past.
In this context, right-wing populism is not merely a political position.
It is a trigger to that old trauma.
The immune system activates.
2. Systemic Threat, Not Just Policy Disagreement
Right-wing populist movements often challenge the assumptions of the system itself: national identity over European integration, border control over fluidity, cultural particularism over universal norms.
They do not oppose a policy.
They reject the framework.
To the system, this is not a rival proposal—it is a rejection of its DNA.
And so the response is not one of debate.
It is containment.
3. Narrative Disruption
Systems survive not just through force, but through story.
The dominant narrative in Europe—liberal, inclusive, progressive—is upheld by institutions that believe in its necessity.
When an alternative narrative emerges—one that speaks to exclusion, rootedness, demographic anxiety—it is not treated as an idea, but as a contaminant.
Because whoever controls the narrative controls legitimacy.
And legitimacy, once lost, cannot be recovered easily.
4. Institutional Inertia
Many of Europe’s institutions—judiciaries, universities, media—were built during decades of centrist or center-left governance.
Their internal compass points in that direction by default.
Even when neutral, they lean.
And leaning systems, when shaken, self-correct aggressively.
Right-wing populists don’t just shake them.
They aim to rewire them.
Which is why the immune response is not slow.
It is sudden.
5. Moral Asymmetry
The language of inclusion and equality wears the clothing of morality.
The language of hierarchy and tradition is dressed in suspicion.
This imbalance means that right-wing populists are often not measured by effectiveness, but by tone.
Not by policy, but by posture.
And in a moralized landscape, tone is everything.
Once the system feels a breach in moral hygiene, it reaches for antibiotics.
Even if the fever was just emotional weather.
6. Unabsorbable Elements
Left-leaning protests can often be absorbed.
Their ideas may be softened, their edges rounded, and eventually included in a broader consensus.
But right-wing populists refuse absorption.
Their critique is not of mismanagement.
It is of foundational design.
You cannot co-opt someone who wishes to tear down the architecture.
Which leaves one option: resistance.
7. Fear as Memory
The system remembers.
Even if its memory is stylized and selective, it remembers what came before.
And it senses—rightly or wrongly—that it might return.
This fear is not always rational.
But immune systems don’t wait for logic.
They operate on instinct.
And instinct, in politics, can become dogma.
And so we arrive at this strange place:
Where the defenders of democracy begin to limit the field of speech;
Where the protectors of openness close their ears.
I am not here to defend any movement.
But I do believe that truth emerges when we look at things not as we wish them to be, but as they are.
And what we have, it seems, is a political immune system.
A system that attacks not only threats, but perceived threats.
Not only infections, but symptoms.
Not only danger, but difference.
And while it may protect what it was built to preserve,
It risks creating the very conditions it was designed to avoid.
I offer no conclusion—
Only the image of a system that defends itself so thoroughly
That it sometimes forgets what it was defending in the first place.