The post-2008 crisis saw the height of Europe’s extreme-center consensus, with social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties uniting around austerian dogmas. Many right-wing populists who made Euroskeptic noises in that period have now become part of the European Union’s mainstream. Yet while their threats to quit the bloc have faded, the recomposition of the EU leadership has left it lacking strategic direction and increasingly vulnerable to external shocks. The extreme center has resisted predictions of its demise, but by integrating forces that have undermined its narrative of liberal progress.

 In 2015, Tariq Ali published The Extreme Centre: A Warning.¹ In it, the veteran New Left Review editor damned the takeover of British and European public life by US-style oligopolies united by shared pro-business assumptions. Confident in their austerian dogmas but distant from the popular mood, elites from across the center-left and center-right divide had converged around a program of mass privatization and rolling back previously won gains in working-class living standards. If the 2008 economic crash raised questions about the future of liberal capitalism and prompted national governments to adopt more clearly interventionist strategies to prop up the banks, this produced no deeper split in mainstream opinion. Instead the dominant parties used the crisis to entrench the claim that government’s proper role was to restore profitability. In one European country after another, parties of apparently opposite political camps broke off hostilities, joining grand-coalition governments or introducing technocrats to impose near-identical measures. Ali’s account insisted that this hegemony was thinner than it seemed. In this new era, he suggested, a merry-go-round of corporate consultants, technocrats, and political and media avatars ruled over a hollowed-out democracy. This was the “void” described by Peter Mair, in which the masses have withdrawn, or rather been expelled, from thoroughgoing democratic participation.²

Ali’s survey of the dominant corporate-managerial politics was built on a hopeful narration of popular skepticism toward these processes. The Extreme Centrecast low voter turnout in the United States as a reflection of mass belief in pervasive corruption and thus in terms of justified cynicism about futile electoral games. However, Ali suggested, the elite management of crisis at the expense of ordinary people was also producing organized countermovements, expressed by such rising forces as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and the Scottish independence campaign. Each seemed to offer a different understanding not just of austerity measures but of how politics should be done. These bottom-up, democratic-spirited forces, Ali argued, could draw upon the already established examples of Latin American left populism (the epigraph praised late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez as “the first leader of a movement that defeated the extreme centre”). Yet these left-wing movements did much less to shape the following decade than many believed possible in 2015. They each tried to give more organized institutional form to the popular discontent over worsening living conditions and the looting of the public realm. But if these grievances didn’t exactly disappear, their expression by parties of the Left soon ran into serious setbacks.