All of the above obviously feeds into the socioeconomic resentment shared by many low-and-middle-income people across the Continent today. Where they direct that hostility varies a great deal. At a different time in European history, a powerful labor movement along with socialist and communist parties helped to aim popular frustrations more squarely at big business and the super-rich. While they were far from perfect, institutions like France’s Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) or the Italian Communist Party helped identify both the common enemies and allies of workers. Such class-based analysis would bring some much-needed clarity to the debate today.

After all, the European Union per se isn’t responsible for the woes of the working class. Get rid of it and everyone’s problems don’t go away. The ultimate culprits are the powerful multinational corporations, the ultra-wealthy, and an overgrown financial sector that have all managed to use the EU’s various rules and treaties to achieve long-standing aims. These forces favored the privatization of state services well before the creation of the monetary union, and they’d continue to if it were ever to collapse. Likewise, it’s in the DNA of business lobbies to fight to keep private-sector wages in check, just like their allies in government seek to do in the public sector. It wasn’t the European Union that birthed the modern corporation or its obsession with rewarding shareholders, and blowing it into smithereens won’t do anything to alter boardroom incentives that put a premium on pleasing Wall Street and the City of London.

Ideally, a pan-European working-class identity would take shape to counter this onslaught from capital. In fact, it already exists to some extent, especially in strongly unionized sectors. Ask a mail delivery carrier in Normandy, for instance, whether he feels like his interests are closer to those of his boss in Paris or those of a colleague in Eindhoven; the answer he’d give should be obvious. Many European labor unions, too, are already running transnational organizing drives—like those at Ryanair and Amazon—and recognize that these sorts of initiatives are critical to their long-term viability. Some left-wing political parties are also improving links to one another. While Europe’s old alliance of social-democratic parties has largely abandoned its dreams of social change, newer parties like La France Insoumise and Podemos in Spain have filled the void and sought to strengthen ties across borders.

Still, these efforts have only limited effects. For much of the low-to-middle-income population, national identity tends to trump class consciousness, and aggrieved people often struggle to make sense of why their social status fails to meet expectations. The European Union becomes an easy scapegoat for all their woes. It is an extremely dense set of institutions and treaties—complicated by design—that doesn’t lend itself to clear analysis, allowing its critics to bestow on it an almost mystical power. The European Union isn’t just blamed for the local hospital being overcrowded or the train station closing—it’s also seen as the reason why the steel industry fled or why someone’s hometown is losing young people. In short, it’s why the world seems worse than before. According to this view, only a departure from the European Union or a return to the national currency can bring the good times back, or, at the very least, stand a chance of doing so. This kind of thinking often goes hand in hand with another trope: the idea that migrants and foreigners are to blame for boosting unemployment, depressing wages, and straining public services.

This is all fertile terrain for the far right, and indeed, the old monsters are back. From Germany’s AfD to Hungary’s Fidesz, a new crop of populists is thriving in the confusion, doing their best to target anger at immigrants and a caricatured version of the European Union—anything to avoid grappling with questions of class or wealth inequality. But they’re not the only ones to benefit from the situation.

While they’d never acknowledge it in public, the current leadership of the European Union and its allies could not ask for better foes. Well aware that voters are frustrated and that faith in the European Union is on the wane, the likes of Jean-Claude Juncker and Emmanuel Macron understand their future success hinges on remaining the lesser of two evils. The high brass of the European Union’s current ruling coalition—the European People’s Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D)—all share an interest in portraying criticism of the European Union as reactionary and backwards, as a perilous step toward the abyss. From Paris to Berlin, defenders of the current order want all cosmopolitans with a shred of doubt over the European Union to be asking themselves one question when they go to cast their ballots in May: “You’re not one of them, are you?”

This strategy is a deeply cynical way of dealing with criticism. But it also risks further legitimizing the nationalist camp, something French Socialists experienced in the early 1980s. Still in the early days of his presidency, François Mitterrand was worried about mounting opposition from the mainstream Gaullist right. In response, he instructed the state broadcaster to give more air time to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the then-young National Front (FN), a fringe party fueled by colonialist nostalgia and social conservatism. Mitterrand also moved to hold legislative elections under a system of proportional representation instead of the two-round scheme typically used in the Fifth Republic, thereby ensuring that the FN would peel off support from the mainstream right. These moves might have satisfied Mitterrand’s most immediate goal, but they weren’t wise in the long run. The FN went on to win over thirty seats in the National Assembly in 1986, giving it an indispensable platform from which to spout its toxic views. Sixteen years later, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the French political world by winning nearly 5 million votes and qualifying for the runoff round of the presidential election. In 2017, his daughter Marine earned more than 10 million votes in the second round.