Why the Political Immune System Targets the European Right
I’ve been wondering about something. Not out of outrage or allegiance, but quiet curiosity.
Why does Europe’s political system react so quickly, almost instinctively, when right-wing populist parties rise?
I am not interested in defending anyone, or attacking them either. What interests me is the pattern itself. Because it keeps repeating. It feels less like a conversation and more like a reflex. As if the system were a body meeting something unfamiliar. It does not reason. It defends.
Maybe that is what we are watching: a kind of political immune response. A system protecting not its ideals, but its structure.
After 1945, Europe did not only rebuild its cities. It rebuilt its conscience. Nationalism, racial identity, and authoritarianism became not just political errors but moral wounds.
The European Union was meant as a safeguard. Supranational institutions, shared rules, shared memory. A way to make another descent into barbarism impossible. In that light, right-wing populism is not simply a policy stance. It is a trigger. The system tenses up.
Still, I wonder if something else is going on. Right-wing populists rarely argue within the existing framework. They question the framework itself. They prefer nation to integration, borders to fluidity, culture to universalism. To the system, that looks less like dissent and more like rejection. And when that happens, argument gives way to control.
Europe’s story has long been one of progress and inclusion. It is told and retold by institutions that see themselves as guardians of that narrative. When another story appears, one that speaks of rootedness, or loss, or demographic change, it is often treated not as a perspective but as a threat. Whoever holds the dominant story holds legitimacy, and legitimacy, once shaken, is hard to restore.
It is also true that most of Europe’s major institutions were built during decades of centrist or centre-left stability. Their internal compass still points that way. Even when they try to stay neutral, they lean. And when leaning systems are pushed, they tend to snap back quickly. That may explain the speed of the response we keep seeing.
The moral language matters too. Equality sounds virtuous; hierarchy sounds suspect. Tone becomes a kind of proof. Once the tone feels wrong, the system moves to correct it, sometimes before substance is even examined. It treats discomfort as danger.
I keep thinking about memory. Europe remembers its own collapse into darkness. Even the generations who never lived it feel the weight of that inherited warning. But memory can distort as easily as it can guide. Immune systems do not always distinguish between what once hurt them and what merely resembles it. And in politics, instinct can harden into dogma.
At this point, I have to question the metaphor itself. The system is not only reacting; it may also be failing to adapt. Immune systems evolve. Europe’s has not. Europe was built to never forget the horrors of World War II. That memory became its moral foundation.
The system isn’t broken. It’s doing what it was meant to do: keeping the past from happening again. The trouble is, the world has moved on. New problems appear, but the system still sees the old danger. It reacts to echoes instead of what stands before it.
And since that memory is what holds Europe together, changing it would mean changing everything. Its resistance to change once gave it strength. Now it makes it rigid.
And yet, many of the questions raised by the right are not without reason. Concerns about borders, democratic representation, or cultural dislocation are not fantasies. They are part of lived reality. But to a defensive system, truth does not always matter. A challenge is treated as an intrusion, even when it might point to a weakness that needs attention. The tragedy is that the system no longer tells the difference between what threatens it and what could help it heal.
In Europe, dissent is now treated as danger. The system is reacting to its own lifeblood, the open exchange of ideas, the clash of viewpoints, the right to question power, as if such things were no longer acceptable. These are the very forces that keep a democracy alive, the friction that renews it, the argument that protects it from decay. When they are treated as threats, the cure begins to resemble the illness, and the system starts to consume its own vitality.