PARIS — Call it the Brussels Consensus. A system of beliefs rooted in European Union treaties helps explain the growing gulf between policy elites and ordinary citizens that may cause a political earthquake in European Parliament elections next May.

These articles of faith are regarded as self-evident truths in the European Commission and at the European Central Bank but are often regarded by voters as the cause of their misfortunes rather than the solution to them.

This disparity, exacerbated by a four-year slump and soaring unemployment caused by the euro zone’s debt crisis, is fueling attacks on the European Union itself and on its single currency, the euro, by populists of the far right and the radical left.

Like the free-market Washington Consensus that prevailed in the 1990s after the collapse of communism, there is no official definition of the Brussels Consensus.