One of the most memorable book titles in the English language is The Strange Death of Liberal England. Are we now witnessing the strange death of liberal Europe? As anti-liberal populism grips the very heart of Europe, threatening even the throne of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the danger is in plain view. There is a new political dividing line in Europe, at least as important as the old line between left and right. It splits existing parties and throws up new ones. It opens new fronts between nations as well as parties. On one side, there is the camp of Merkron (Merkel-Macron), on the other, that of Orbvini (Orbán-Salvini).

For all the important differences between Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on issues such as the eurozone, they both favour liberal, European solutions, based on international cooperation, inside the EU and globally. Hence Merkron. For all the differences between the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and the Italian populist deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, they both advocate illiberal, national solutions, scapegoating, excluding or expelling ethnically or culturally defined “others”. Hence Orbvini. Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the European council president, Donald Tusk, clearly belong in the Merkron camp, while the Bavarian CSU, the Austrian Freedom party, Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland, and some (though not all) Brexiteers, belong under the chequered standard of Orbvini.

The battle between Merkronismus and Orbvinismo will shape European politics over the next year. As politicians limber up for European elections in the summer of 2019, the biggest party grouping in the European parliament, the European People’s party, is desperately clinging on to Orbán’s Fidesz party, and has even been making furtive overtures to Poland’s PiS, for fear of the Orbvini camp forming a new alliance to compete with it. Playing off the name of his party, the Lega (League), Salvini threatens “a League of the Leagues of Europe”. It’s been a long time since a European election was so unpredictable.

By no means all the fractures inside the EU can be situated neatly along the Merkron-Orbvini axis. Disagreements about the eurozone and the next European budget, for instance, fall more along national than political lines. Brexit is 27 countries against one. But in terms of the way national democratic politics play into European politics, this is the new game in town.

At the moment, team Orbvini is clearly on the advance. Team Merkron looks as tired as the German and Spanish football teams in the World Cup, doggedly playing their system but not breaking through to score. Merkel’s own future is very uncertain, while the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has become a pivotal player, currently leaning towards Orbvini.

The issue of immigration, around which the camp of Orbvini gathers its supporters, is at once real and symbolic. Following what the dissident balladeer Wolf Biermann vividly calls Merkel’s “wonderful mistake” in 2015, a great many refugees did come to Germany in a very short space of time. More than 2 million east Europeans came to Britain after EU enlargement in 2004, and real concerns about housing, employment, healthcare and schools contributed to the Brexit vote. Italy, Spain and Greece have genuinely been struggling, with little help from their north European partners, to accommodate large numbers of both refugees and migrants, who risk a watery death in the Mediterranean.

Immigration is a symbolic issue, gathering concerns about culture and identity like metal filings on a magnet

Immigration is also a symbolic issue, gathering concerns about culture and identity like metal filings on a magnet. Levels of uncontrolled immigration into the EU have fallen dramatically since 2015, but that does not assuage people’s feelings about how their countries have already changed. In a poll conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation in 2017, an EU-wide average of 50% of those asked agreed with the statement “there are so many foreigners in our country, sometimes I feel like a stranger”. In Italy the figure was 71%.

George Dangerfield, the author of The Strange Death of Liberal England, argued that the Liberals declined in early-20th-century England because they failed to respond to large new forces, including the movement for women’s suffrage, the Labour movement and Irish nationalism. A hundred years on, the crisis of liberal Europe is mainly a result of forces that liberalism itself has created. Liberalisation, Europeanisation and globalisation have between them produced rapid, visible change in European societies.

For too many, it has felt like change for the worse. Exploiting these discontents, the populists tell a simplistic story about how pulling up the national drawbridge and “taking back control” will result in the restoration of an imagined golden past of good jobs, happy families and a more traditional national community. Meanwhile, the digital revolution, now advancing through machine learning towards artificial intelligence, means there will be even more disruptive change and insecurity, especially in the workplace.

The liberal fightback in Europe now has a formidable task list. It will be difficult enough to find rational, practical answers to the real problems of inequality and insecurity. We are only at the very beginning of working those answers out, and we face a rapidly moving target because of the pace of the digital revolution. Radical policies such as a universal basic income or a basic job guarantee will be required. Even if you have a new John Maynard Keynes, it takes time to get from the intellectual work of a Keynes to the election-winning programme of a Labour party under Clement Attlee.

Beyond this, liberal Europe has to find ways of addressing those deep emotional needs for community and identity that populists exploit. As you can see in every World Cup football crowd, national identity remains an incomparable source of passion and belonging. For the foreseeable future, it is an illusion to believe that any transnational or supranational identity can compete. While doing everything we can to strengthen a shared European identity, and indeed a global one (which the World Cup in some sense also represents), we cannot abandon the nation to the nationalists. To complement Europeanism and internationalism, we need a positive, civic patriotism, of the kind Macron is promoting in France.

Then you have to weld all this into an election-winning programme, and then you need a party to win the election with that programme. But we don’t have many of those parties either. Macron, with his République en Marche! movement, is the exception that proves the rule. Everywhere else, liberals have been losing out to more illiberal tendencies in mainstream parties of centre left and centre right, including Britain’s Labour and Conservatives. Or centre-right parties have only retained power by appeasing the more illiberal approaches of their populist coalition partners, as in Austria and the Netherlands.

All this leads me to conclude that the fightback of liberal Europe will take quite a few years. Things will probably get worse before they get better, with more goals for Orbvini and setbacks for Merkron. No, I do not believe we are witnessing the strange death of liberal Europe, but we must gird ourselves for a long, hard-fought recovery.

• Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist