Europe is not only dealing with a cost-of-living disaster. Behind the headlines of inflation, austerity, and social unrest lies a deeper structural transformation—one which dangers turning the European Union right into a democracy for the wealthy. Whereas hundreds of thousands battle with precarity, Europe’s wealthiest residents are entrenching their energy in regulation, coverage, and media. As wages stagnate, housing turns into unaffordable, and social protections wither throughout the continent, one other actuality thrives—one in every of excessive privilege and affect. (Cárdenas-García, Mesa, and Castro 2021; Tsoukalis 2012; Ioannou and Charalambous 2024; Palley 2013) The super-rich usually are not merely surviving Europe’s overlapping crises; they’re quietly reshaping its constitutional and political order to swimsuit their pursuits. Their energy just isn’t incidental. It’s systematically embedded within the authorized frameworks, governance constructions, and public narratives that outline the European Union immediately.
In my current article within the Journal of Widespread Market Research, I argue that Europe is evolving into an oligarchic constitutional order: a system the place the governance of society more and more protects the buildup of personal wealth whereas hollowing out the ideas of democracy, equality, and human dignity (Regilme 2023; 2024; 2025). Except this trajectory is reversed, Europe’s democratic guarantees threat collapsing into mere ceremony, concealing deep constructions of inequality. In that article, I exploit the time period oligarchic constitutional order to explain a system by which the formal constructions of democracy—elections, authorized norms, constitutional texts—stay intact, however their substance is steadily reoriented to serve the pursuits of the ultra-wealthy. Quite than dismantling democratic establishments outright, this order repurposes them to entrench inequality, protect capital from public accountability, and normalize financial exclusion as politically authentic. Legal guidelines are written and interpreted to guard property over individuals; funds guidelines are codified to prioritize investor confidence over social want; and supranational establishments more and more act as enforcers of market self-discipline, not democratic oversight. My speculation is that Europe could also be evolving towards such a constitutional order—one the place governance seems democratic in kind, however more and more capabilities in ways in which reproduce oligarchic energy. This trajectory, if left unchallenged, dangers reworking the EU’s foundational guarantees of solidarity and equality into formalities that conceal quite than appropriate structural injustice.
The numbers reveal the stakes. Amid a historic world pandemic, the world’s billionaires noticed their fortunes develop by practically 38%, reaching $13.1 trillion, at the same time as hundreds of thousands of employees confronted mass unemployment and social insecurity. In Europe alone, billionaires amassed $2.8 trillion, with luxurious dynasties comparable to LVMH in France and the Quandt household in Germany increasing their fortunes. This surge in elite wealth just isn’t a random by-product of globalization; it’s the results of deliberate political selections. Because the Seventies, high earnings tax charges throughout Europe have collapsed, and public companies have been systematically rolled again. The Maastricht Treaty’s inflexible fiscal guidelines enshrined austerity and market liberalization into the constitutional cloth of the EU, prioritizing monetary stability over social solidarity (Gill and Biscahie 2022; Lucarelli 2014) .
Whereas many Europeans nonetheless think about the EU as a bulwark of social safety, the fact is that constitutionalized austerity and deregulation have made it simpler for capital to stream freely whereas leaving nearly all of residents extra precarious than ever (Blyth 2013; Mexhuani and Mexhuani 2024; Berman and Snegovaya 2019). Rich elites haven’t merely tailored to those constructions—they’ve actively formed and captured them. In Hungary, for instance, EU agricultural subsidies supposed to help small farmers have been systematically siphoned off to complement Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political allies. On the supranational degree, European tax havens like Luxembourg and Eire have helped the super-rich legally shelter huge fortunes, undermining nationwide tax methods and accelerating inequality .(Oxfam 2023; Ogle 2025)
But the management of political establishments is simply a part of the story. Europe’s billionaires have additionally captured the general public sphere, shaping how inequality is perceived and justified. Media moguls comparable to Vincent Bolloré have turned retailers like CNews into engines for far-right propaganda, whereas highly effective enterprise households use possession of newspapers and broadcast networks to mute criticism and champion neoliberal orthodoxy. Even philanthropy, typically portrayed as noble altruism, turns into a software to launder reputations, deflect regulatory scrutiny, and distract from calls for for structural redistribution, as seen within the closely marketed “giving again” initiatives championed by elites.
A extra harmful phenomenon nonetheless is how the language of human rights and equity has been weaponized to defend elite privilege. Public narratives more and more blame poverty on particular person failure quite than structural exclusion. As David Cameron famously claimed, poverty stems from private points like alcoholism and drug habit, not the systemic dismantling of welfare protections and labor rights. This individualization of social failure masks the true dynamics of inequality and transforms injustice into private inadequacy. In the meantime, strategic litigation by companies at our bodies just like the European Court docket of Human Rights twists the ideas of freedom and property rights into weapons for shielding the super-rich towards democratic accountability.
All through all of this, a profound hypocrisy festers. The European Union’s founding treaties solemnly commit it to human dignity, democracy, equality, and solidarity. However in follow, the EU’s constitutional construction has prioritized the liberty of capital over the welfare of individuals, bolstered oligarchic energy over collective rights, and guarded market entry over political equality. Europe’s political economic system immediately is healthier described as one in every of systemic stratification, not solidarity. The parable that oligarchy is a uniquely Russian or International South downside should be shattered. Europe has its personal oligarchs: billionaires who form elections, foyer politicians, dominate public discourse, and systematically defend methods of utmost privilege (S. S. Regilme 2024). What distinguishes them just isn’t their habits however their skill to cloak it within the language of legality, stability, and progress. The “good European oligarch” is a harmful fiction that blinds residents to how democracy is being hollowed out from inside.
The problem forward is immense. Tinkering with transparency guidelines or minor tax reforms won’t be sufficient. Confronting Europe’s oligarchic drift calls for a elementary reimagining of governance, regulation, and public discourse. It requires new analysis agendas that heart elite company and expose how constitutions, laws, and ideologies are manipulated to entrench wealth. It calls for political actions that refuse to simply accept that inequality is pure, and that resist the normalization of democratic decay.
With out structural transformation, Europe dangers changing into a sublime museum of democratic beliefs: admired by vacationers, deserted by residents, and dominated in follow by an more and more unaccountable aristocracy of wealth. The time for illusions is over. The super-rich usually are not the saviors of Europe’s democratic future. They’re, more and more, its silent undertakers.
References
Berman, Sheri, and Maria Snegovaya. 2019. “Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 30 (3): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0038.
Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The Historical past of a Harmful Thought. New York Metropolis: Oxford College Press.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F, Bruno Soria De Mesa, and Diego Romero Castro. 2021. “Capitalism Has No Garments: The Sudden Shock of the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Views on International Growth and Expertise 19 (5–6): 545–64. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341570.
Gill, Stephen, and Thibault Biscahie. 2022. “New Constitutionalism and the EU: Its Limits and Prospects past the COVID-19 Pandemic.” New Political Science 44 (4): 524–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2022.2129925.
Ioannou, Gregoris, and Giorgos Charalambous. 2024. “Vital Junctures, Ideological Continuity and Change in Western Europe: Evaluating the Pandemic and the International Monetary Crises.” International Society ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2024.2359953.
Lucarelli, Invoice. 2014. “The Euro: A Forex in Search of a State.” The Financial and Labour Relations Assessment 25 (3): 484–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304614548962.
Mexhuani, Fitim, and Burim Mexhuani. 2024. “Authoritarian Neoliberalism Debates: A Vital Assessment of the Literature in Central and Japanese Europe.” New Views 32 (2): 145–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825×241230935.
Ogle, Vanessa. 2025. “Noblesse With out Oblige.” Dissent 72 (1): 131–35. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2025.a950174.
Oxfam. 2023. “Survival of the Richest: How We Should Tax the Superrich Now to Battle Inequality.” January 1, 2023. https://www.oxfam.org/en/analysis/survival-richest.
Palley, Thomas I. 2013. “Europe’s Disaster with out Finish: The Penalties of Neoliberalism.” Contributions to Political Financial system 32 (1): 29–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/cpe/bzt004.
Regilme, Salvador Santino. 2023. “Constitutional Order in Oligarchic Democracies: Neoliberal Rights versus Socio-Financial Rights.” Legislation, Tradition and the Humanities 19 (1): 126–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872119854142.
———. 2024. “Europe’s Tremendous‐Wealthy: In direction of Oligarchic Constitutional Order.” JCMS: Journal of Widespread Market Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13702.
———. 2025. “Oligarchic Rivalry: US–China Tariffs and the International Politics of Inequality.” Reworking Society. Could 27, 2025. https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2025/05/27/oligarchic-rivalry-us-china-tariffs-and-the-global-politics-of-inequality/.
Tsoukalis, Loukas. 2012. “European Disintegration?: Markets, Establishments, and Legitimacy.” Journal of Democracy 23 (4): 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0073.
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