Ah yes, the favorite pastime of the disillusioned masses—laying blame neatly at the feet of those two women, as if they alone engineered the mess Europe finds itself in. By all means, get in line. It’s a long one, and the queue stretches well past the horizon. But to focus your fury exclusively on those two figureheads is to close your eyes to the rot running beneath the surface.
There are just as many men—vicious, calculating, and every bit as self-serving—playing this game with equal ruthlessness. And plenty of women, too. The real architects of our continental decay are not merely the faces on the podium but the invisible ranks behind them: the bureaucrats, advisors, consultants, and opportunists who have spent three decades constructing this grand illusion of competence and virtue.
Yes, the leaders bear responsibility—they’re not innocent by any measure of decency—but they are still just the decorative tips of a very long spear. The shaft is made of us: the obedient, the complacent, the comfortable. The greedy little functionaries and moral exhibitionists who execute orders without a flicker of doubt or shame.
You can purge the figureheads all you like. Dismantle them publicly, hang their reputations out to dry, strip them of their fancy titles. But if the underlying cultural disease remains untouched, it won’t change a damn thing. The machine will simply manufacture new idols to worship and new scapegoats to despise.
We as a society have allowed idiots to rise. We allowed idiotic policies to take root. We watched, shrugged, and consoled ourselves with the illusion that someone else would fix it. We didn’t challenge them, we didn’t punish them at the ballot box—we enabled them.
If we really want to assign blame, we need not look to Brussels or Berlin. We need only walk to the nearest mirror and hold our gaze. But the elites can rest easy. There’s no danger of that happening. We would rather die than admit we’ve been willing accomplices in our own undoing.