The Threat and the Fortress: Liberalism Under Duress in Europe

1. Introduction

Although centuries have passed since the first introduction of modern democracy, the world is facing challenges to its core institutions sustaining it. Countries who are supposed to be the anchors of liberal democracy have been facing the gradual weakening of democratic norms. In fact, what is common across countries experiencing backsliding through the erosion of fundamental norms is its fragile nature.^[1] Both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) have had recent developments that alter their democratic balance whether through an erosion of checks and balances, the decline of trust from the governed, or populist challenges. There has been a clear and ongoing pattern of democratic decline that has started around the same time yet at a different pace. For such analysis, it is important to take into account the empirical data of democratic performance, such as the V-Dem, an index which collects data, conceptualizes and measures the strength of democracy on a scale from 0 to 1.^[2]

Since 2015, the V-Dem score, particularly the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), has been declining for some EU Member States. Notable examples can be seen in Hungary, going from 0.48 to 0.32, and Poland, from 0.78 to 0.62.^[3] This is particularly relevant as their V-Dem scores illustrate a decay of freedom of expression, transparent elections, judicial constraints on the executive, among other components.^[4] Nevertheless, despite the fact that the US has also been declining, it has slightly performed better, decreasing from 0.85 to 0.75 since 2015.^[5] This can mainly be attributed to the worsening of freedom of discussion and media as well as decline in the quality of elections and potential executive overreach but not as quite explicit as Hungary or Poland. In fact, as per a V-Dem Report, it has raised concerns for ‘autocratization’, adding the country into a potential democratic watchlist.^[6]

However, these trends are to be interpreted as evidence of an erosion of democratic norms, in a slow, gradual and incremental regression.^[7] Despite the fact that such countries cannot be equalized due to their difference in nature, it serves to demonstrate a trend of illiberal pressure causing the weakening of democratic norms, manifested in decline of democracy indicators such the LDI, especially judicial constraint and freedom of expression.

For the purposes of this article, democratic norms shall be defined as procedural and substantive standards based on shared expectations that sustain the fabrics of a democratic system.^[8] In order to assess its decline, two main features will be taken into account: judicial independence and the media press. As it will be explained later, these are treated as core democratic norms because they function as essential safeguards against arbitrary governance and play a central role in sustaining liberal democratic order. Thus, this section will delve into their decline as it merits analysis for its implications in sustaining democracy before situating it within the broader political framework of illiberalism.

2. Erosion of Judicial Independence

Among the different components of a democratic system, one of the core pillars is the judicial branch and its ability to act without any political influence or pressure. It serves as a way to execute impartial decisions to safeguard all individual rights, to protect the separation of powers doctrine and to hold the government in power accountable and therefore, it is widely regarded as a cornerstone of democracy.

Yet, a continuous erosion of judicial independence has become evident during the past decade. Empirical data such as the V-Dem have continuously shown a decline of judicial constraints and the respect of rule of law. Moreover, other indicators such as the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index publish their findings and scores for each country according to different factors including constraints on executive power, civil justice, order and security, among others. It is worth mentioning that when it comes to their overall score, the difference between the US and some EU Member States is barely noticeable. For instance, the US ranks 27 out of 143 with a score of 0.68 while Poland, a country known for notable erosion of its rule of law, ranks 32nd with a score of 0.66.^[9]

2.1 Poland’s Concrete Erosion of Judicial Independence

Within the EU, Hungary and Poland are often referred to as the ‘leaders of democratic backsliding’, with the independence of the judiciary being the main target.^[10] Prior to the 2024 attempts of reforms, Poland exemplifies one of the most salient cases of how its judicial system, especially its independence, declined. Starting in 2015, the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS) began introducing legislative initiatives that systematically weakened the ability of existing courts, from ordinary courts to the Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court, to constrain the executive and to uphold the rule of law.^[11] Some authors have referred to this process as the collapse of the judicial independence of Polish courts.^[12] This perfectly emphasizes the problem: the political pressure and intervention in the judicial branch, including the appointment and removal of justices, politicisation of judicial oversight bodies and “court-packing”.^[13]

As part of their illiberal agenda, the judiciary became the central focus through pressure and coercion towards the judges to rule favoring political authorities who sought to consolidate power and through the creation of judicial bodies such as the National Council on the Judiciary.^[14] Hence, courts became politicized under the control of the ruling party rather than institutional independence. In fact, according to the Rule of Law Index, Poland has consistently scored low for indicators for their judicial performance, for instance Civil Justice (0.60) and Criminal Justice (0.58) as of 2025.^[15]

Given this, it raised concerns of the weakening of democratic norms both on national and EU level as it breached EU standards. The fact that its judicial independence declined not through an autocratic dismantling of its institutions but rather through legal reforms within a democratic framework really demonstrates that such erosion may happen under lawful mechanisms while undermining the very base of what it is supposed to sustain: democracy.

2.2 United States’ Politicization of Judicial Independence

Similar to Poland, the US judicial system has increasingly been subject to politicization. However, contrary to Poland, it has not been done through formal reforms. Instead, its erosion has been a consequence of becoming more partisan, which results in the drop of confidence by the people. The difference lies in history: American democracy has been developing for more centuries and hence provides stronger constitutionally provided judicial bodies, while Poland’s safeguards for the judiciary provided in its Constitution are new.^[16]

Therefore, the current debate among scholars is whether judicial decisions in the US are based on political alignments rather than their impartiality, resulting in the drop of 35% of trust by the governed in its judiciary.^[17] However, since this branch serves as a check on both the executive and the legislative, its legitimacy is essential in maintaining a democratic government. Yet, it cannot be upheld if judges are 'partisan actors’.^[18] Surveys demonstrate that around 2019, 64% of Americans believed that Supreme Court Judges were motivated by the law but it shifted to political motivation around 2022 and by 2025, 54% believe they are mainly motivated by politics.^[19]

The most common thought for politicization is the judicial confirmation process in which during the last decade, the Senate has used the ‘nuclear option’ on three occasions to change the requirement of a supermajority for a cloture to a simple majority for judicial confirmation. Nevertheless, the biggest threats would be the continuing pressure and even threat towards the judges when ruling in a case, for instance, Minority Leader of the Senate Chuck Schumer pressuring Supreme Court Justices to make the ‘right’ decision.^[20]

Furthermore, judicial politicization can be illustrated through the Supreme Court rulings that have challenged its existing limits by bypassing procedure standards and even precedents and norms.^[21] Contrary to unanimous decisions, there has been a concerning increase of polarized decisions emphasizing the partisan differences between voting judges.^[22] This conservative and partisan pattern in the Court has led to an increase in its control and authority on elections but has reduced its scope for protecting voting rights.^[23] The most notable example is the highly debated overturn of Roe v. Wade regarding abortion rights.^[24] To illustrate this, a poll has demonstrated an overall decrease of the trust in the judicial system, particularly a decrease of Democrats’ trust in the Court from 34% to 24% and hence raises concerns since similar decreases are in countries such as Myanmar, Venezuela and Syria.^[25]

Nevertheless, since it is already heavily influenced by the current government’s political party, recent developments aim to undermine the courts’ legitimacy and credibility. Instead of making structural changes, it has opted to avoid, ignore or even attack judicial limits and rulings. It is no more a matter of independence as the line is blurred: it is about the institution itself as a whole to constrain the executive and uphold the rule of law.^[26]

3. Media Freedom and Pluralism

Alongside judicial independence, the freedom of media and pluralism are essential democratic norms that sustain the very basic democratic governance. International organizations, including the EU itself, consistently emphasize media freedom as a cornerstone of a democratic society.^[27] This entails freedom of expression, media independence and flow and access to information for civic participation and active engagement or to what Habermas conceptualizes as the common public sphere.^[28] Without media independence and pluralism such a public sphere would become unilateral by blocking equal representation of any other perspective different from the dominant one and preventing meaningful discourse.^[29] As a result, it leads to the weakening of democratic accountability and has recently become more challenging due to the new technological advancements.

Traditionally, media freedom serves as an additional watchdog of the democratic system by identifying any possible threats to its equilibrium and by being the ‘first line of defence’ against any possible abuse.^[30] Nevertheless, some scholars have increasingly associated the continuous erosion of democracy to occur simultaneously with the deterioration of freedom of press as exemplified over the past decade in both emerging and established democracies.^[31] Common patterns have been found in which the media and press become politically constrained to the executive branch’s agendas.

3.1 Poland’s Political Media Capture

As explained earlier, with the election victory of PiS in Poland, the weakening of democratic norms extended from the judicial branch’s erosion to also gradually consolidating control over public media spheres. Most importantly, some authors describe that around 2023, public media broadcasters such as Telewizja Polska, Polskie Radio, and Polska Agencja Prasowa became the government’s outlet for narrative dominance under the mask of restoring legal order and ensuring judicial legitimacy.^[32] Yet, the main concern is not the government’s desire to take over the media but rather procedural means resorted to do so. The executive, in order to capture the media and press, bypassed their powers, usually reserved for the National Media Council, by seizing it by force. However, some independent reports, such as the International Press Institute, have acknowledged that independence of media and pluralism had improved and an end of abuses to influence them.^[33]

Furthermore, it implemented legal and regulatory reforms to its copyright law, added TVN and Polsat (TV companies in Poland) into a ‘strategic entities’ list entitling them protection of officials and exemption of government approval for structural changes. More concerning, these concrete actions undermined the fragile independence of Public Service Media, leading to a deepening of the lack of journalists’ autonomy. For instance, in 2024, a journalist was fined under the grounds of defamation or the news programmes were not impartial, although they were less partisan after such reforms.^[34]

Data such as the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) assesses media pluralism through various factors such as market plurality, fundamental protections, political independence, among others. As for Poland, the MPM 2025 report showed the country has a 53% risk score for media freedom and pluralism, placing it in a medium-high level of risk.^[35] Broadly speaking, this percentage of risk represents a cumulation of recent attempts to restore media independence and of remaining problems but also new challenges. Despite the fact that it has been attempting to improve its independence, reflected in the decrease in Political Independence, there are still persistent risks such as ownership concentration, illustrated in the decline in Market Plurality.^[36] And yet, Poland was able to place 31st in the World Press Freedom Index, increasing its overall score from 69.17 to 74.79.^[37]

3.2 United States

If a specific moment were to be pinpointed in which freedom of press started to decline, it would be post 2016 elections. Even after centuries of the first introduction of press rights, media freedom in the US has been gradually decaying and will most likely continue worsening. According to the World Press Freedom Index, the US has placed 57th with a score of 65.48 whereas Norway, placed 1st, obtained a score of 92.31.^[38] The report further explains that, in this sphere, the US has a high concentration of media ownership where profits are prioritised over genuine public journalism.

Moreover, in the political context, Donald Trump’s second term was marked by a serious set of ‘war on the press’: from the politicization of the Federal Communications Commission to the banning certain news agencies from the White House and defunding public media.^[39] Legally speaking, the First Amendment already provides robust safeguards for the press itself by preventing the government from controlling the media and yet, it may not be sufficient to counter the threats posed on them.

Different from Poland, the US exemplifies how the erosion of democratic norms can happen without necessarily having formal legal changes to consolidate control over the media and press. Instead it has unfolded through political pressure and delegitimization of independent journalism rather than a direct capture. On the one hand, the President himself has filed a suit for a broadcasting network to lose its license as they portrayed him negatively and the Administration has filed complaints against several TV networks, excluding Fox.^[40] On the other hand, news agencies have faced criticism from choosing not to support a presidential candidate to having editors’ resignations and unnecessary departures of news anchors, leading to a crisis in this sphere.^[41] In other words, the media’s ability to function independently has been weakened in practice: instead of operating autonomously, it falls under the pressure from partisan actors seeking to shape the discourse and diminishing its capacity to react.

4. Policy Recommendation

In terms of timeline, it is worth noting that post-2023, reforms aiming to reestablish the democratic order in Poland have been attempted to be implemented. Even though it has faced many obstacles and has failed, it appears to have slowed down such decline. Meanwhile, the US takes a different trajectory as it is gradually increasing. Still, this should not be interpreted as if such erosion is irreversible but it calls for coordinated policy responses to strengthen democratic resilience.

4.1 Countering Erosion of Judicial Independence

When it comes to the core pillars of the judiciary, in this case its independence, it is rather challenging to rehabilitate and restore it once power has been consolidated or politicalized by the executive power. As a result, such effects cannot be fully reversed neither straightforward nor immediate reforms as democratic erosion is not easily reversible once taken hold. In fact, recent attempts in Poland demonstrate that once judicial independence has been eroded through structural reforms and direct political intervention, its reconstitution will take more than one attempt.

Therefore, Poland has already taken a step forward to restore its rule of law through its post-2023 reforms. Since judicial erosion stemmed through the legislative initiatives granting the political party control over both the composition and functioning of the courts, its restoration must be addressed through a depoliticization of the judiciary, especially its appointment procedure, and overseeing bodies. If partisan judges remain on the bench, any attempt to reform such a system would be void.

Furthermore, a rehabilitation mechanism should be implemented in order to strengthen the judiciary's security against any future threats. Taking into account the developments of the past decade, it is understood how fragile the judiciary can be and thus, stronger tenure protections as well as limits on executive discretion and influence over the procedures may be necessary. It will also need to simultaneously be implemented with broader initiatives to rebuild the trust from the governed.

Although the US resorted to a different approach, the primary policy recommendation is similar to Poland’s: the depoliticization of judges. Cases in the US tend to reveal a growing perception of judges as partisan actors instead of being impartial. Yet, contrary to Poland, the US context stems from a politicized use of constitutionally granted appointment procedures. One method would be constraining the use of the ‘nuclear option’ requiring always the Senate supermajority, at least for the Supreme Court.

Since the public trust and belief in their judiciary has declined throughout the years and therefore, it must be addressed and reinforced. Moreover, a mechanism that strengthens judicial statutory protection by preventing any external threat, intimidation or influence must be implemented.

4.2 Sustaining Media Freedom and Pluralism

As mentioned in earlier sections, Poland has experienced an increase post-2023 in media freedom indicators. This can be mainly attributed to the reforms being implemented quite successfully despite the fact that some scholars describe this as an unlawful take over.^[42] Nevertheless, the editorial independence of Public Service Media (PSM) must be guaranteed and strengthened through reforms. Moreover, a revocation of ‘strategic entities’, the depoliticization of some bodies such as the National Media Council and an anti-trust statutory framework for the media ownership concentration should be implemented.

As for the United States, for the freedom of media and pluralism, it is important to reiterate the limits and safeguards that the Constitution itself imposes. Even though initiatives such as the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Act) of 2024 have been attempted to be implemented and yet failed, it is of paramount importance to have a ‘federal shield law’.^[43] Instead of the PRESS Act, a ‘Media Freedom Protection Act’ could be proposed and be implemented in order to constrain the power and influence of the executive on the media and to be able to foster meaningful discussions. In addition, the promotion of media and journalist independence must be encouraged.

5. Conclusion

Recent trends demonstrate that countries are facing pressure from concrete political and legal actions that undermine long-established constitutional and institutional frameworks. Both the United States and Poland share similar patterns of a downfall of the quality of their democratic norms: from an erosion of judicial independence to a blurry media freedom and pluralism. Since these two factors are considered to be pillars of democratic norms, any decline either in judicial independence or in media freedom contributes to the weakening of said norms. This dynamic is exemplified through empirical evidence that demonstrates that the trend of decline of democratic norms are attributed to the erosion of, in this instance, judicial independence and of media freedom and pluralism.

Therefore, throughout this section, an assessment of these norms was conducted to finalize with policy recommendations. For the case of Poland, its judicial system must be restored through the depoliticization of its judges, their protection in maintaining its independence and a rehabilitation mechanism. In terms of their media freedom, Poland must depoliticize some of its bodies, revoke the ‘strategic entities’ and provide for a statutory framework in order to sustain its freedom and pluralism.

For the case of the US, it must restore its judicial resilience, particularly its Supreme Court in order to safeguard fundamental rights and not allow for justice to be a consequence of partisan actors’ decisions. Moreover, a mechanism for statutory protection and limitations to the nuclear option are further recommended. For media freedom, an overall promotion of independence is highly encouraged in addition to legal frameworks to be implemented.

As it will be further examined in the next section, illiberalism cannot fully be understood in the context of institutional erosion alone, but it must also examine the political and geopolitical framework. While the weakening of democratic norms, such as judicial independence and media freedom, illustrate its erosion in practice, these are embedded with political dynamics that shape illiberalism. Thus, it is not only the institutional erosion but the combined shift towards illiberalism that demonstrates that democratic recovery has become increasingly difficult.

It has become hard to avoid the feeling that Europe’s leaders are losers. When Politico summarizes the make-or-break EU summits as “Friedrich’s flop,” the Financial Times explains “why voters hate Starmer,” and Reuters declares Emmanuel Macron’s legacy “evaporated,” one gets a flavor of how it feels to be a European liberal in 2026.

In Europe’s capitals, partisans of the old order—liberal institutionalists like Merz, Starmer and Macron—have woken up in a world they did not prepare for. Russian aggression, American hostility, backlash against mass migration, and the persistence of right-wing populism have presented radically new challenges to Europe’s mainstream. Each of these threats, unforeseen just a few years ago, have swirled together in European liberals’ worldview, creating the idea that European liberalism is under one great state of siege.

Liberal leaders have turned into immigration restrictionists, justifying the compromise of generous asylum policies with appeals to protect liberal values at home. They have become security hawks, spending more on defense and calling for tight European collaboration to resist Russian invasion and American needling. Many are now practitioners of what Karl Loewenstein called “militant democracy,” with the rise of right-wing populism leading liberal institutions to surveil, prosecute, and bar their political opponents from office, purge judges, and re-run elections.

The adaptations of Europe’s liberals share a core character: in each case, liberal leaders have concluded this is not a time to extend liberalism—not to the foreign adversary, not to the needy of the developing world, and not even to the large parts of their own population that vote for the populist right. The language of European liberals today is a defensive one: liberal leaders speak of firewalls, militancy, restrictions, defense, and pragmatism. It is a liberalism designed to hold out: one which can be preserved for its remaining adherents but has, at least for the time being, given up dreams of extending itself further. Today, the European mainstream have become Fortress Liberals.

***

Just twelve years ago, a casual glance at Europe’s party politics showed a landscape that had been familiar since the Second World War. Within Europe’s largest democracies, the political center-right of David Cameron and Angela Merkel was friendly to business, firmly supportive of the European project and the Atlantic alliance, and open to immigration. The other camp, center-left leaders like Francois Hollande or Edward Miliband, worked to balance traditional social democracy with the innovations of “Third Way” liberals like Tony Blair. Center-left heads of state challenged their opponents on welfare and labor issues, but joined the center-right in supporting the European common market and NATO interventions aimed at protecting human rights.

From the Tories and Labour in Britain to Greece’s PASOK and New Democracy, most European countries long had a solid center. In the 2009 EU-wide elections, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the center-left Socialists and Democrats combined to win 61% of the seats in the European Parliament. The two parties to the right of the EPP—clusters of Euroskeptics and nationalists—won just 11% of the seats.

By 2024, the forces to the right of the EPP more than doubled their share to 26% of voting seats in Europe’s common legislature. Polls suggest that today they’d capture one-third of those seats. As the populist right has become Europe’s opposition, the center-right and center-left have converged into an uncomfortable ruling coalition.

These changes have taken place at the national level, too: in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, and Norway, parties to the right of the EPP consistently poll first. In Hungary, Belgium, Czechia, and Italy, further-right parties have taken command of government.

In 2016, the populist explosion raised a question of whether Europe’s fundamental political divides might change. In 2026, that question has been answered. National and continental politics are now better understood as a battle between a populist, Eurosceptic, and illiberal right against those who remain committed to the liberal order. There remain differences between socialists like Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and conservatives like Friedrich Merz; there are also gaps between moderate nationalists like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who has committed herself to the Western alliance, and more radical figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who embrace the mantle of illiberalism. But those divisions are now subfactional. As a video of Meloni and other right-wing leaders endorsing Viktor Orban’s reelection campaign confirmed, the major contest for Europe’s future is between an ascendant right-wing that is opposed to liberal institutions, and a broad camp of everyone else.

***

The single biggest driver of this rapidly-changed political order is immigration.

Asylum seekers have flowed into Europe in the past ten years. Between 1994 and 2013, the annual number of people seeking EU asylum never reached north of half a million. That number ballooned to 1.3 million during the 2015-16 migration crisis, and has remained elevated: over 900,000 first-time asylum seekers arrived in Europe in 2024. Much of the refugee influx has come from the Muslim world: data suggest Muslims represent about 70% of Germany’s post-2015 refugee wave, for example.

European populations have become hostile to large-scale migration: a YouGov survey at the end of last year found that across seven European countries, respondents supported immigration moratoria and mass deportations. These views prevailed in countries where large numbers of migrants have actually arrived, like Spain, and in places where migration has been far more limited, like Poland. In all seven countries, pluralities of those surveyed agreed that even legal migrants did not share their values, with less than 10% of respondents feeling legal immigrants were being integrated “very successfully.”

Popular anxieties allowed the populist right to break through; research has shown that in Germany, for example, voters long held more restrictionist views than politicians in the CDU, Germany’s major conservative party. The populist right exploited this gap and profited: polling suggests that voters’ views of immigrants and religious minorities have far more power to explain votes for right-wing parties today than they did in 2008.

Conspicuous displays of openness—Merkel embracing millions of Syrian refugees and declaring “wir schaffen das”(“we can do this”) or the swelling of net migration under Britain’s Boris Johnson—allowed the populist right to depict mainstream parties as more committed to a humanitarian ideology than to addressing voters’ preferences for controlled borders.

Answering this challenge, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen was the first conspicuous model of Fortress Liberalism. Elected in 2019, Frederiksen came from Denmark's Social Democratic Party. But she shifted her party right on immigration, coming to power on a promise of a “zero refugee” policy and implementing an aggressive assimilation plan, even planning to send asylum seekers for processing in Rwanda. Frederiksen’s policies, though still controversial, have allowed her survival, with her party poised to win its third consecutive election next year.

Once an outlier, Frederiksen has now become a model. Poland’s liberals won their 2023 election by outflanking hard-right opponents on immigration. Keir Starmer and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Misotakis have both decried boats of migrants rafting through the sea; Starmer has warned of Britain becoming an “island of strangers.”

Following Frederiksen’s lead, most major European politicians have articulated a new approach: for liberal values to be safe, newcomers must accept them. Europe’s mainstream now emphasizes elements of immigrant culture which are seen to threaten liberal values like gender tolerance, secularism, and non-violence.

For Fortress Liberals, a secular society cannot accommodate those who view politics through a religious lens: Sweden’s center-right Deputy Prime Minister sparked controversy after declaring that “Islam must adapt to Swedish values.” Merz, when pushed on his increasingly restrictive line, defended his policy by saying: “Ask your daughters.” France’s Interior Ministry warned of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration of French politics, with the goal of advancing “political Islam” against French laïcité. It was long a right-wing argument that immigrants endangered secularism, non-violence, gender rights, and sexual tolerance: the mainstream has become comfortable with this logic.

These changes have remade Europe: where cars once zipped between Schengen Area states, liberal leaders have reintroduced border inspections and waiting lines. In December, the member states of the European Convention on Human Rights unanimously agreed to revisit expansive interpretations of prohibitions on degrading treatment and mandates for family reunification which have made deportations extremely difficult. In 2014, five EU and Schengen countries had physical barriers at their borders; today that number is 19.

There are some caveats. For Fortress Liberals, groups already accustomed to European norms—such as the four million Ukrainian refugees in EU member states—are largely given an exemption from the migration crackdown.

Similarly, liberals have sought to be clear that their policies are not racialized; liberal parties have increasingly found politicians with immigrant backgrounds who push restrictionist policies. Starmer’s crackdown is being led by Pakistani-British Shabana Mahmood. Denmark’s Frederiksen made Matias Tesfaye, born to an Ethiopian refugee, her Minister for Immigration. Sweden’s Social Democrats, looking to regain power in 2026, made a Kurdish-Swede their spokesperson on the question of assimilation. The leader of Germany’s Green Party, Turkish-German Cem Özdemir, called for asylum restriction, appealing to his daughter’s experience being “stared at or sexualized by men with migrant backgrounds.”

This has served to staunch the bleeding for some liberal parties: Frederiksen has held on, Poland’s liberals remain competitive, and establishment coalitions in Germany and Austria have clung on against a rising far-right. But it has not solved their problems—in all these countries and more, the combined voting share for populist-right parties continues to rise. Progressives have critiqued Frederiksen or other Fortress Liberals for “legitimizing the right-wing narrative,” arguing that emphasizing the issue amounts to seeking to fight the populists on their home turf.

The rhetoric of a people and continent under siege—small boats and smuggling routes, the threat of retrograde values, political infiltration, and sexual crime, the construction of border barriers third-party processing hubs, and the basic underlying premise that it is simply impossible to extend Europe’s openness to large numbers of people from the developing world—has rightly given rise to the term “Fortress Europe.” But rather than the fantasy of a rightist fringe, Fortress Europe is now a liberal concession to reality.

***

As Europe’s liberals have adapted to a migrant surge, they have also come to grips with a much more powerful and aggressive invasion.

We must strain to remember now how different the European security situation was in the early 2010s: just over a decade ago, and NATO held joint fighter jet exercises with Russia (then a member of the G8), European Security conferences were spent discussing the drawdown in Afghanistan and the coup in Mali, and the EU spent just 1.3% of its combined GDP on defense.

More so, the spirit of Europe was still defined by the most optimistic visions of democracy spreading to neighboring regions: the Arab Spring had not yet soured beyond recognition, NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe remained fresh, and protests and dissidents like the Pussy Riot band in Russia gave the impression that democracy might advance further still.

Europe then came under literal and rhetorical attack. Terror attacks at the Bataclan in Paris and bombings in Brussels and Manchester unsettled Europe and the Arab Spring had chilled into Winter; the last hopes of democratizing Russia slipped away with Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Brexit, Trump, China’s economic aggression, and Putin’s ultimate invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the return of war to the European continent have created a familiar story of Europe’s fronts all growing weaker.

The unique development of the past year is the radical change in America’s posture. The Oval Office confrontation with Ukraine’s Zelensky and the unveiling of a National Security Strategy which decried “civilizational erasure” in Europe served as prelude for January’s Greenland saga, which led European politicians to new heights of shock and fear, contemplating the long-unthinkable possibility of armed conflict with America. French politician Raphael Glucksmann was left to sum it up: “we are the free world.” Now in military conflict with Russia, economic competition with China, and political confrontation with the United States, Europe finds itself a single bloc in need of reform.

Poland’s leaders, for example, now regularly refer to their country as holding up the “Eastern Front” of Europe against Russia’s onslaught; in the past month alone, Poland has scrambled fighter jets and pledged to build anti-drone infrastructure on their Eastern borders. France’s government has taken the threat of imminent war seriously, distributing a “survival manual” to their citizens. Germany’s Merz has explicitly recognized the end of continental peace, declaring the “Pax America” over and Europe on its own.

Europe’s newfound sense of siege has led Europe’s Defense Commissioner to call for a 100,000 strong European army. The liberal party which came first in the Netherlands long supported cuts to the defense budget—in last year’s campaign, they proposed cutting healthcare benefits to fund defense and create an EU-wide army.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte typifies the Fortress Liberal transformation: as Dutch Prime Minister, he kept his country’s defense spending minimal, calling instead for NATO to ensure the Dutch contribution was spent well. In 2025, he made almost every NATO commit to spend 5% of GDP on defense—far more than the 2% President Trump called for in 2017, all the while working overtime to placate Trump on Greenland and restore any sense of normalcy.

Europe has recognized its defense siesta as a historical anomaly. Of the rapidly-changed political issues, defense has generated the broadest consensus within Europe—and rightly so. One sees the change in the army recruitment ads which now plaster bus stops in Paris or Warsaw, declines in the numbers of German, Dutch, and French visitors to American cities, and polls suggesting that half of Europeans view President Trump as an “enemy” of their continent and that 60% of European citizens want even greater increases in defense spending. European leaders have cast threats to Greenland, for example, as a threat to an entire international order: the collapse of that order has fostered a greater unity in the European mainstream than ever before.

The fortress mentality is something new. As long as Europe has had liberal democracies, they have had America to protect them: in two World Wars and against Soviet communism. The world has not yet known liberal Europe that has no Uncle Sam to lean on.

***

For as much time as they spend worrying about immigration and the challenge from Russia and America, Europe’s liberal leaders are most concerned not to hand power to the populist right at home.

In most countries, institutionalists perceive the populist right as an existential threat to their values: extremists who would destroy Europe’s commitments to peaceful collaboration, human rights, judicial independence, and open society. In light of that, Fortress Liberals now filter every move through the question: how does this affect support for the populists?

Debates within the institutionalist camp are now held on these grounds: those who seek immigration restriction argue it is necessary to prevent backlash from helping the populist right, while those who seek open borders argue that restrictionism legitimates the populist narrative, seeking to present a stark moral alternative instead. Welfare cuts are condemned not for hurting the poor, but for aiding the populists. All over Europe, institutionalists cling to power while polls promise they will lose the next election: this has made government terms feel like a race against time, and justified exceptional measures.

Increasingly, attempts at persuasion have given way to forceful tactics aimed at preventing populists from taking power. Europe’s institutional leaders bear a special historical awareness of the threat of right-wing populism: every European liberal is terrified to be a doormat for disaster. Accordingly, liberals have embraced the concept and mechanisms of “militant democracy,” the idea that laws and institutions must sometimes restrict some political freedoms in order to protect the core of a democratic state.

In Poland, Donald Tusk’s liberal government used the idea to justify extralegal removals of judges and charge former nationalist government officials with abuses of power (one has now received asylum in Orban’s Hungary). Marine Le Pen, longtime leader of France’s National Rally and two-time opponent of Macron, has been banned from running for office in France’s 2027 presidential election on charges of using EU Parliament funds to boost her party. Romania’s Constitutional Court and Permanent Electoral Authority barred multiple candidates from running on charges that their Russophilia would make them unable to uphold the rule of law; they did this after annulling a presidential election on charges of Russian interference.

Germany has labelled its right-wing AfD an extremist group, justifying extensive surveillance, and continues to mull a total ban on the party. At the continental level, liberal leaders have given up trying to woo Viktor Orban and have instead levied heavy penalties on Hungary and sought to abolish his country’s veto power.

To keep the populists out, liberal parties have embraced the idea of the “firewall.” The German mainstream has its famous firewall against the AfD, with every political party pledging not to join the party in coalition governments at the national, state, or local level. In Austria, France, and the Netherlands, right-wing parties have been excluded from government even after placing first in national or regional elections.

The firewall against the right has meant increasingly unwieldy combinations within the fortress: to stop Marine Le Pen’s party from obtaining a parliamentary majority, the French Communist Party teamed up with center-right Macronists to drop out of races and urge voters to vote for candidates with whom they had no shared ideology—except opposition to Le Pen. Merz’s governing agenda has found itself dependent on German leftists; in one region, his CDU formed a three-party “Blackberry coalition” with social democrats and the Euroskeptic left-wingers to keep the doors barred to AfD entry. The cost of this collaboration is that the unwieldy majorities disagree about policy; once they stop the right, there exists no agreed path forward.

As firewalls have been harder to maintain, Fortress Liberals have taken a two-track approach. Some once-taboo groups, like the Sweden Democrats Party or the rightist group in the European Parliament led by Giorgia Meloni, have been sufficiently tamed to become potential partners in support for NATO or Ukraine. In other places, like the Netherlands and Austria, cooperation with the hard-right has failed dramatically, and normal battle lines have resumed. A hard policy of non-cooperation, increasingly bolstered by the legal power of the state, remains the norm.

Institutionals feel besieged in part because these strategies have not reduced far-right support: no matter how clear mainstream parties make it that they will not admit populists into government, their support does not dissipate. This has created a feeling of inevitability surrounding right-wing ascent in Europe’s biggest countries: the firewalls, bans, and restrictions increasingly seem like last-ditch tactics of delay.

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As Europe’s liberals have felt the walls closing in, they have drawn connections between these three threats. It is not only immigration restriction that is couched in the language of thwarting the right, but their approach to foreign powers.

Russia and America are charged with fueling the far-right: Britain has investigated Russian influence on elections, and Romania cited Russian interference in cancelling their 2024 election. JD Vance’s Munich invective, Elon Musk’s rallying for the AfD, Trump’s endorsement of Viktor Orban, and the National Security Strategy’s praise of “patriotic European parties” have given European institutionalists good reason to believe Trump’s America is not on their side. The connection goes both ways: think tanks and research groups from Europe's mainstream constantly warn that the populist surge threatens the continent’s military preparedness, while right-wing leaders in Brussels and Rome thwarted a plan to hand frozen Russian assets to Ukraine.

The connection between the migration and Russia—perhaps the most tangential of the three—has become surprisingly palpable. Poland has dealt with Russia and Belarus sending poor migrants to illegally cross her borders, and new research has shown that as early as 2015, Russia was instrumentalizing migration to destabilize its borders with Norway and Finland.

Increasingly, Fortress Liberals understand these three fronts as one collected threat: Poland’s liberal candidate in last year’s presidential election argued the populists would jeopardize necessary support from the EU that was necessary for Poland to be a strong “Eastern shield”—protecting Europe’s borders from both the Russian security threat and illegal immigration, thwarting populists in the meantime.

The leader of the Netherlands’ liberal center-right connected domestic populism, Islamic influence, America, and Russia under the banner of unfreedom: “Unfree ways of thinking,” she declared, “are being spread in the Netherlands from Islamic countries, but also from the Kremlin and from American Christian groups.” She blamed these “unfree ways of thinking” for violence against women, gay couples, and a broader challenge to the Netherlands’ century-old liberal traditions.

Some liberal theorists have tried to find comfort in the Fortress idea: Michael Ignatieff argues that liberal societies fight better when they understand that they are in danger. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin, Ignatieff argues “it will be up to the embattled fortresses of liberal democracy, and the conviction of their peoples, if liberty is to prevail.” History remains a contest of wills, and the reality of illiberal threats should strengthen the liberal resolve to make hard choices.

Indeed, Fortress Liberals like Starmer and Macron can be sympathetic because they are clear-eyed about the challenges and distrust of their worldview. The continuing European support for Ukraine and the EU’s ability to temper moderate populists like Meloni commend Ignatieff’s view that liberalism sometimes needs a wake-up call to work well.

Fortress Liberalism also has its place in the liberal inheritance: early liberal theorists grappled with the limits of universalizing their own principles. Baruch Spinoza, in suggesting a liberal ethos of tolerance, demanded liberal societies restrict teachings or religions which “tend to produce obstinacy, hatred, strife or anger.” When Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined society coming together around a civil religion of enlightenment, he said such a religion would only be intolerant of just one thing: intolerance. When courts restrict democracy in the name of the rule of law or liberals insist on fast-paced assimilation, they draw on a tradition which has recognized that liberalism relies on basic shared principles to work—it has always been idealistic to suppose such principles can thrive and extend based on their intrinsic righteousness.

Yet Enlightenment-era liberals and Cold War Western Europeans shared an advantage which even the most abstractly-minded liberals today do not have: a clear future project. Spinoza and Rousseau were hoping for something altogether new: secular, modern, and rational government. Similarly, nineteenth-century liberals like Tocqueville and Mill saw growing social equality as a providential fact; while they may not have invited the world’s poor in, they believed liberalism was the ultimate end of every nation. Cold War liberals like Berlin were at once determined to resist the Soviet threat and saw the promise of liberalism extending to new reaches of the world were the communist system to fall. Institutions of 1945 (the UN, the Refugee Convention) and 1989 (the WTO, an expanded EU) were premised on the idea that liberalism could work for everyone.

For all its limitations, the predecessor of Fortress Liberalism—the universalizing, overconfident liberalism of Fukuyama's “End of History”—contained a strong aesthetic promise of the future: high-rises shooting up in Belgrade or Bucharest, McDonalds in Moscow, women, minorities, and others advancing in society, travel and cooperation between nations becoming more commonplace. The fall of Soviet communism promised the triumph of liberal democracy in the parts of the world which had been most hostile to it. The admission that some ethnic groups or countries are inadmissible to the liberal project is tragic.

The practical strategy of reinventing liberalism as the preserve of besieged, sensible, Europeans is a difficult balancing act because it takes an ideology which has always relied on the promise of future extension to rally its adherents. Similarly, if liberalism disclaims the advantage of being universalized by democratic, nonviolent means, it relies instead on the same “might makes right” approach as illiberal ideologies.

A ban on the AfD is so hard to imagine for this reason—can a liberal state actually restrict an idea out of the political arena? What if all the AfD’s leaders simply reconstituted themselves in a different form? A liberal state can only restrict political action or claim to operate in a state of emergency for so long before its claim to liberalism slips away.

Today, the stronger future project belongs to Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage. Their common vision is identifiable: a more homogeneous, child-rearing, religious, and nationalistic Europe. While these politicians have their own foibles, their adherents have a common confidence that Europe’s mainstream has sorely lacked for almost a decade. Even if largely nostalgic, the populist vision of the future offers something crisp and responsive to the lived experiences of Europeans today—it is easier to believe in this vision than in a fortress under siege.

Indeed, others point out that defenders of a fortress can lose sight of their own purpose: Nadia Urbinati, in a 2024 article, drew an analogy to soldiers preparing their own defense against an enemy. Relying on external motivations deprives the soldiers of an identity: “Where could the defenders of the garrison find the necessary strength to become an effective fortress if the only energy they relied on came from outside, from opposing an extensive enemy?” This captures much of why Starmer, Merz, or Macron seem to be tragic figures: without history on their side, it is easier to note what they are against than with what they are for. A coalition stretching from communists to conservatives cannot present a unified, compelling vision to their populations.

Some have tried to reject the Fortress mentality: efforts like the “Abundance” idea and its adaptations in Europe, or the effort to make affordability the central promise of a populist left are groping for a positive vision—but these movements have not had large electoral breakthroughs, in part because they have not gone beyond the Fortress Liberals on fundamental questions. Mark Carney predicted last week that “fortress nations” will fail. He spent the rest of the week inside a fortress, perhaps working on his policies to increase defense spending, reduce immigration, or to “buy Canadian.” On defense, immigration, and the threat of the far-right, Abundance liberals and populist leftists remain cadets within the Fortress.

Fortress Liberalism lens is most useful in illuminating that European leaders still imagine the present challenges to be temporary. They now understand this period as uniquely challenging—but ultimately likely to abate. Our leaders and our societies have not yet internalized the possibility of a return to the constant warring or the ceaseless inter-ethnic violence that defined pre-20th century Europe. In the minds of the world’s most powerful liberals, their task is to survive the siege day-to-day, whatever adaptations it requires. The fortress has mugged them of any vision of what to create next if “normalcy” returns. Practicing this lost art of imagination may make for a stronger defense than Europe’s liberals have yet been able to muster.