For decades, European politics has resembled a Punch and Judy show, only with fewer laughs and more austerity. On one side, the market-worshipping neo-liberals clutching their spreadsheets and “fiscal responsibility.” On the other, vaguely embarrassed centrists who occasionally tut at inequality but still vote for trade deals written by Exxon lawyers. The stage is well-lit. The audience, increasingly, is not impressed.
But while corporate power has captured institutions from Westminster to Brussels, it hasn’t silenced resistance. Across the continent, citizens, thinkers, activists and even the odd rogue economist are challenging the capture—not just with slogans, but with blueprints for change. This isn’t about utopia. It’s about damage control, dignity, and doing better than a system that currently functions like a vending machine for billionaires.
Welcome to Europe Inc., a four-part series on how neoliberalism turned the European project into a corporate shareholder meeting. From inequality to militarism, corporate capture to resistance, this isn’t just a critique — it’s a guided tour through the ruins and a map to the exits. Steeped in dry wit, and entirely unaffiliated with any hedge fund.
Ban the chequebooks: campaign finance with training wheels off
Prem Sikka, who knows the UK’s economic corruption inside out and probably has the receipts, is unequivocal: if you want a functioning democracy, you need to ban private donations. Not “regulate” them. Not “limit” them. Ban them. Entirely.
The UK is the most glaring example—where the Conservatives are bankrolled by hedge funds and property developers, and Labour, post-Corbyn, now seems comfortable sipping from the same vintage bottle. But Europe isn’t innocent. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! was practically a start-up for ex-bankers, lavishly funded by finance. In Germany, the CDU received millions from energy and auto industry giants while posturing about climate targets. In Italy, Berlusconi didn’t even bother to separate his media empire from his political platform.
Solutions exist: Norway and Sweden have strict caps and generous public funding for parties. Belgium bans TV ads for parties entirely, forcing actual debate instead of branding exercises. Imagine that.
It’s time to stop treating political parties like private businesses with loyalty cards. If democracy is a public service, it should be publicly funded—and not just by those with seven-figure net worths and a spare villa in the Alps.
Democratising the economy: not a radical idea, just long overdue
Let’s be clear: neo-liberal economics is not an inevitability. It’s a choice—albeit one imposed, repeated, and repackaged so often it now feels like gravity.
Across Europe, however, that spell is weakening. Economists like Grace Blakeley, Yanis Varoufakis, and Thomas Piketty are openly rejecting the script. Their ideas aren’t fringe—they’re practical. Wealth taxes. Public ownership of energy and transport. Housing as a right, not an asset class. Even the IMF, usually the spiritual home of polite austerity sadists, has flirted with wealth redistribution in recent papers.
Take Spain. The government, led by a coalition of PSOE and the left-wing Sumar, has pushed for rent controls, hiked the minimum wage, and introduced a windfall tax on energy firms. Not exactly revolutionary, but worlds away from the “there is no alternative” refrain. In Portugal, the Left Bloc has long called for democratic control of utilities. In Germany, Berliners voted (non-bindingly, alas) to expropriate corporate landlords like Deutsche Wohnen, whose business model consists largely of buying property and watching tenants suffer.
Public ownership works. Ask the people of Paris, who re-municipalised their water service in 2010 after private management led to price hikes and worse service. Or the French postal bank (La Banque Postale), which offers basic banking services to millions the market deemed “unprofitable.”
Economic democracy isn’t ideology—it’s survival.
Rewilding the media landscape: journalism without yachts
Independent media is the lifeblood of informed democracy. Which is why it’s treated with such disdain by those in power.
Across Europe, legacy media is in various states of decline, debt, or docility. Many are owned by billionaires (e.g., Le Figaro, Die Welt, The Telegraph), private equity groups (Politico Europe), or conglomerates with more lobbying staff than journalists. The result? A continent where pension reform protests are labelled “chaotic,” but tax cuts for hedge funds are “fiscally prudent.”
Fortunately, a new ecosystem is flourishing. In France, Mediapart has exposed everything from Sarkozy’s Libyan campaign cash to Macron’s revolving-door cabinet. In Germany, Correctiv has unravelled far-right donor networks and environmental scandals. In Hungary, Telex and Átlátszó battle the Orbán media machine with stubborn independence. In the UK, The Bylines Network, Declassified UK, and Novara Media pick up where the BBC fears to tread.
And it’s not just outlets—journalists are organising too. Freelancers in Europe are unionising, fighting precarious conditions that keep investigations in the bin and clickbait on the front page.
To support them? Anti-SLAPP laws to protect against corporate lawsuits. Grants without editorial strings. Public funding schemes for independent journalism—not PR firms with a camera.
Because when media exists only to protect the powerful, democracy becomes little more than a press release.
Mutual aid, co-ops and people who won’t wait politely
Politics doesn’t only happen in parliaments. It happens in housing co-ops in Bologna, solidarity kitchens in Athens, and citizen energy collectives in Copenhagen.
Mutual aid exploded during the pandemic—ordinary people organising food, medicine, and care without waiting for slow-moving bureaucracies or “public-private partnerships” that do little but rebrand responsibility. In places like Barcelona, local councils work with citizen assemblies to co-manage services. In Amsterdam, activists forced the city to acknowledge and act on Airbnb’s role in gentrification. In rural France, collectives have reoccupied abandoned farmland to practise agroecology and provide food locally.
Even the cooperative model—once seen as dusty—is back in style. From cooperative housing in Zurich to platform co-ops in Berlin, these aren’t nostalgic experiments. They’re durable, democratic, and increasingly necessary alternatives to a system that delivers precarity for most and dividends for few.
This is politics, too—just not the kind that gets televised.
From managed decline to organised resistance
None of this is simple. The road to reclaiming democracy isn’t a straight line. It’s a mosaic—messy, multilingual, sometimes maddening. But it’s happening. And it doesn’t require utopian thinking. Just a refusal to keep settling for a democracy that functions more like a customer feedback form for Goldman Sachs.
So: ban the money. Reclaim the commons. Fund the press. Build solidarity, not spectacle. And stop pretending there’s nothing we can do while private jets burn fuel faster than nurses can fill a kettle.
Because if we don’t shape the alternatives, someone else will—and they’ll be wearing very expensive suits, paid for with public money, to tell you there’s no alternative.