The pressure cooker Europe cannot open

Something is building across European politics that the usual vocabulary — mid-term blues, anti-incumbency, protest votes — cannot quite name. In Britain, Keir Starmer’s net favourability has dropped to −46, worse than any modern prime minister at this stage. In Germany, Friedrich Merz has cratered to 16 per cent approval within a year of taking office, while the AfD has overtaken his CDU/CSU in national polls. In France, Macron’s numbers sit near the bottom of a 24-country global comparison. Alexander Mercouris, the London-based commentator who hosts The Duran alongside Diesen’s Greater Eurasia Podcast, calls it a pre-revolutionary situation — not because revolution is imminent, but because the political system has lost the flexibility that would make revolution unnecessary.

The elite that went abroad

Mercouris opens with a claim that unites the British, German, French, and Scandinavian crises under a single diagnosis: a governing class that is focused on Russia at the expense of everything else.

The argument runs as follows. Across the major European states, the political leadership has become narrowly fixated on the conflict in Ukraine, European integration on a security axis, and the broader confrontation with Russia. This fixation has crowded out attention to accumulating domestic problems — stagnant economies, rising costs, crumbling public services — and the resulting disconnect between rulers and ruled is generating what Mercouris describes as increasing political volatility.

Starmer is the case study. Mercouris reports that a common nickname in Britain is “Never-here Keir” — a reference to the prime minister’s frequent travel abroad, mostly in connection with Ukraine. The charge is not that foreign policy is unimportant, but that it has become the only thing the leadership appears to care about, while domestic problems — flat living standards, rising taxes, widening deficits — grow more severe and more visible with every quarter. The data bears this out: Labour’s government approval sits at −49 as of May 2026, roughly where the Conservatives were just before they lost the 2024 election.

But Mercouris insists Starmer is not an aberration. He is the rule. Merz in Germany is “mostly focused on rearmament to fight Russia.” Frederiksen in Denmark, the revolving leadership in the Netherlands and Poland — the pattern repeats. The foreign policy consensus is not one leader’s mistake. It is the operating system of the European political class.

Britain's particular trap

Britain’s version of the crisis is, in Mercouris’s account, worse than the continental one — because the economic foundations are thinner and the political alternatives are narrower.

The structural argument here is economic. Britain in the 1980s, Mercouris contends, over-invested in its financial sector and was the first major European economy to de-industrialize comprehensively. North Sea oil covered the costs for a time. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, it exposed a one-dimensional economy without the strategic depth to absorb the shock. The result has been nearly two decades of stagnation: flat or falling living standards, flat output, rising debt, rising taxes, and widening deficits on both the current account and the trade balance.

On top of this economic fragility, Mercouris argues, Britain has become even more locked into the foreign policy consensus than other European countries. There is no equivalent of Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally or La France Insoumise, or Italy’s Salvini. The Conservative Party collapsed as an effective opposition. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, comes from outside the establishment, but the closer Farage gets to power, the more he moderates his foreign policy language to avoid frightening the defecting Conservative voters he needs. The result is a pressure cooker: enormous public frustration, no institutional release valve, and a political class that responds to criticism by doubling down on the existing line.

We might eventually see the pressure cooker explode. And that could throw up political movements and political forces which we can’t yet see but which could be much more radical than anything we have seen up to now. — Alexander Mercouris

The May 2026 local elections confirmed the trend. Reform UK gained over a thousand council seats. Labour lost more than nine hundred. Farage declared a “historic shift in British politics.” Starmer said he would not resign. The gap between public sentiment and governing policy widened further.

Germany's mirror image

If Britain’s founding myth is Churchill in 1940, Germany’s postwar identity was built on the opposite premise — peace, economic leadership, Ostpolitik. Merz is dismantling that identity at speed.

Mercouris draws a structural parallel. Both countries face legitimacy crises, but from opposite directions. Britain clings to its great-power self-image and cannot let go of the confrontation with Russia because it feels like the last thread connecting the country to its former status. Germany, by contrast, is going against the grain of its own recent history — the commitment to a peaceful, stable Europe, close economic ties with Russia, the Ostpolitik tradition stretching back to Willy Brandt in the 1960s.

The result, Mercouris argues, is the same. Merz’s approval has collapsed to historic lows — a Forsa poll in May put satisfaction at just 15 per cent. The AfD, now polling at roughly 27 per cent nationally, has overtaken the CDU/CSU to become Germany’s most popular party. And the establishment response has been to designate the AfD an “extremist” organisation, expand domestic intelligence surveillance of the party, and maintain the so-called firewall excluding it from all coalition possibilities — even as it leads in poll after poll.

Diesen pushes on the irony. A German chancellor threatening to punish Slovakia’s Robert Fico for attending Moscow’s Victory Day parade — a celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany — captures something about the inversion of Germany’s postwar identity that neither speaker finds easy to articulate. Fico went, laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and met Putin. The Baltic states refused his plane airspace. The EU issued rebukes. Fico responded that he saw no reason to apologise for honouring the Red Army soldiers who liberated Slovakia.

Diplomacy that cannot begin

Finnish president Stubb said the quiet part aloud in May: it is time to talk to Russia. But four years of consensus against diplomacy cannot be undone by a single interview in Corriere della Sera.

In Mercouris’s telling, the European foreign policy establishment has spent months inching toward the conclusion that some form of diplomatic engagement with Russia is necessary. The conversation gained momentum in December 2025, around the debates over the Ukraine loan. Finnish president Alexander Stubb, speaking to Corriere della Sera on 11 May, said explicitly that Europe must engage in direct dialogue with Russia if American policy no longer serves European interests.

But the gap between acknowledging the need for diplomacy and actually conducting it remains enormous. As of mid-May, European leaders have not agreed on who would represent them. They have not formulated proposals to bring to Moscow. They have not defined what their objective in the conflict even is — whether it is defeating Russia, fighting to a standstill, or adapting to the possibility of a Russian victory.

Diesen adds the structural absurdity. Several European voices have suggested Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, should lead the talks. This is the same Kallas who publicly stated there was no point talking to Putin and has floated the idea that Russia should be broken into smaller, more manageable states. The selection of a negotiator whose public position is the abolition of the counterparty is, in Diesen’s framing, not a negotiation strategy but a strategy for ensuring negotiation never happens.

Macron’s trajectory illustrates the pattern. In 2022, he was among the last European leaders to abandon diplomacy with Moscow, arguing that Europe’s future should not be decided in Washington or Moscow alone. By 2026, he has fallen in line. When he sent two emissaries to Moscow more recently, the Russians reported being lectured with the same talking points they had heard for years. There was no negotiation. There was no listening. There was, in Mercouris’s phrase, a dialogue of the deaf.

The western peninsula

Diesen frames the strategic choice Europe faces as a fork in the road — Eurasian integration or irreversible decline — and Mercouris agrees the wrong fork was taken at least fifteen years ago.

The final section of the conversation turns to the structural question: what happens to a continent that was, for centuries, the cockpit of human progress — the place where living standards were highest, technology most advanced, philosophy and culture most vital — when it risks becoming a backwater?

Mercouris does not flinch from the word. Backwater. Europe has the legacy — the education, the cultural and intellectual wealth, the institutional memory — but it is living on borrowed time. The decision to double down on Atlantic alignment rather than diversify toward Eurasia was, in his view, the wrong fork. And the cost of that decision is compounding.

Diesen references a 2010 German strategy paper that warned Germany must avoid becoming merely “the western peninsula of the Eurasian continent.” He borrowed the phrase for his own book, arguing the opposite: that becoming the western peninsula of greater Eurasia would be the solution, not the problem. If Europe sits at the western end of a landmass stretching to the Pacific, connected by trade, energy, and infrastructure, it thrives. If it bets everything on an American patron that is losing interest and capacity, it declines.

Russia, in this framing, is the gateway. It controls access to the Eurasian interior. It can open the door or shut it. And the Europeans, through four years of sanctions, proxy war, and diplomatic boycott, have been systematically antagonising the gatekeeper.

Mercouris notes that Putin, at a press conference after the Victory Day parade, seemed noticeably bitter about Europe. And Putin, he adds, was almost the most Europeanist figure within the Kremlin. The rest of the Russian leadership has already moved on — toward China, toward India, toward the parts of the world that are growing. Europe’s window to remain relevant is closing. It has not yet closed, Mercouris says. But the point of no return exists, and every month of inaction moves it closer.

Coda

What remains uncertain is whether Europe’s political systems can adapt before the pressure cooker that Mercouris describes actually explodes. The conversations about talking to Russia remain conversations about conversations. The parties challenging the consensus — Reform UK, the AfD, the National Rally — are either moderating as they approach power or being excluded from it by institutional design. The economic deterioration is real but slow enough that it has not yet produced the acute crisis that forces action.

What is not uncertain is the direction. Every data point — approval ratings, polling trends, economic indicators, diplomatic non-progress — moves in the same direction. The governing class across Europe is less popular, less trusted, and less capable of responding to its own citizens than at any point in recent memory. And the foreign policy consensus that Mercouris and Diesen see as the root cause of this dysfunction shows no sign of cracking from within.

The reader is left with a question that neither speaker answers directly but that hovers over the entire conversation: is the rigidity of European institutions a feature or a bug? Democracies are supposed to bend. Pressure cookers that cannot vent are supposed to be redesigned. The worry at the centre of this exchange is that Europe’s political class has mistaken inflexibility for strength — and that the correction, when it comes, will be proportional to the years of accumulated pressure.