National decline and lamentations over dictators: Europe looks towards the abyss

Friday, Jan 30, 2026

European democracies face a crisis of meaning amid Trump’s influence and societal unrest, as shown by recent surveys.

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[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

While Donald Trump’s far-right politics are changing the US and the world amidst urban unrest, fears of war, and the breakdown of old alliances, European democracies appear to be mired in a deep crisis of meaning. In France, one of the EU’s economic and ideological engines, the notion that the country is experiencing a “national decline” has become a recurring theme, a situation mirrored across much of Europe according to a survey from Sciences Po’s Center for Political Studies, which reveals a troubling picture of the political and social climate.


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