IT IS not cold inside the Municipal Family Support Centre, but Barbara Choinska keeps her coat on, in the manner of people to whom the world has been hostile. The centre is the main social-services point in Siedlce, a town 90km east of Warsaw. Ms Choinska has five children, no husband and no job. “She struggles to make sure the children are dressed and do their homework,” explains Adam Kowalczyk, the centre’s director. “We send someone each week to help her maintain basic standards, so they don’t get taken away by the state.”

One thing Ms Choinska no longer worries about is having money for food and rent. In 2016 Poland’s new government, led by the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, launched the “Family 500Plus” programme, which pays a monthly stipend of 500 zlotys ($148) per child, starting with the second. Indigent parents like Ms Choinska qualify for their first child, too, so she gets a whopping 2,500 zlotys per month. In Poland, that is not far short of the median after-tax household income—and beneficiaries have no obligation to work.

The programme has transformed the Polish welfare state. Mr Kowalczyk’s centre, which distributes the stipends, has seen its annual budget grow from about 35m to 94m zlotys. The World Bank estimates the programme has cut the rate of extreme child poverty (defined as less than 1,500 zlotys per month for a family of four) from 11.9% to 2.8%.

500Plus is popular, especially in places like Siedlce. Many in Poland’s small towns and villages felt that the previous government, led by the liberal Civic Platform party, looked down on them. Over the past two decades, the economy grew rapidly but inequality also rose, with poverty more common in rural areas. This is partly why provincial Poles voted for PiS. The 500Plus programme fits PiS’s Catholic, pro-family ideology. PiS’s voters are more likely than liberal ones to have two or more children—and a fixed stipend buys more in rural areas than in pricey Warsaw.

At first, liberal politicians called the programme a budget-buster. Now, seeing how popular it is, they embrace it. Jacek Rostowski, who served as finance minister under Civic Platform, says that it is affordable: it costs about 1.3% of GDP, while the World Bank expects Poland’s economy to grow by 4% this year. Civic Platform now campaigns on a promise to expand 500Plus to cover all first-born children too.

Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, boasts that PiS has defied conventional wisdom, favouring the “regular guy” over the “elite”. In fact, child stipends are common in rich European countries such as Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain. Poland’s 500Plus is generous relative to average earnings, but the country’s overall spending on social protection is still only about 20% of GDP, well below the EU average of about 28%.

Historically, welfare-state programmes have been introduced by the centre-left (such as Labour parties in the Nordic countries and Britain) or the centre-right (the Gaullists in France, the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy). Often they were introduced precisely in order to keep extremists from winning power. Yet in Poland, it is the populist right that has seized the mantle of the party of welfare.

And not just in Poland. In Hungary the nationalist Fidesz party of Viktor Orban, the prime minister, has launched New Deal-style public-works programmes. In France Marine Le Pen’s National Front defends the protections enjoyed by permanent employees against the “neoliberalism” of President Emmanuel Macron. In the Netherlands Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party lambasts the government over cuts to health care. The right-wing Alternative for Germany exploits anger over unequal pensions in the country’s east and west. Meanwhile centre-left parties that felt obliged to cut welfare during the euro crisis—the Dutch Labour Party, the French Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats—have been hammered in recent elections.

Since the 1990s the received wisdom in Europe has been that the post-war welfare state was past its peak. But voters often want it to be more generous, not less. In polls in 2014 and 2016, citizens in three-quarters of the EU’s members named “social equality and solidarity” as their priorities for society. Western Europeans unnerved by the global financial crisis want protection against an uncertain future. Eastern Europeans with skimpy public services want the kind of security that their western neighbours seem to have. Where centrist parties have stopped championing the welfare state, populist parties are picking up the slack—and the votes. A poll in January put PiS’s support at 44%. Its closest rivals, Civic Platform and the Modern party, were at 15% and 6%.

No farewell to welfare

Back in the 1980s, when unemployment in some European countries rose to double-digit levels, lavish welfare states were seen as one of the culprits. Generous unemployment benefits and sick leave discouraged people from working, while public spending crowded out private investment. Laws inhibiting employers from laying off workers also discouraged them from hiring permanent staff. The response was a wave of cutbacks, from Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation in Britain to Sweden, where social spending fell from a peak of 34% in 1993 to 27% by the end of the decade.

But by the late 1990s a new approach developed, spearheaded by Denmark and the Netherlands. Their “flexicurity” model sought to combine social protection, provided by the state, with more freedom for employers to hire, fire and adjust contracts. The state also expanded “active labour-market policies”, such as training and job matching, subsidised daycare to help women work full-time, and required the unemployed to seek work.

Scandinavian countries, which were used to providing social benefits directly through the government, moved quickly to implement flexicurity. However, Germany and France, which relied more on protecting workers’ jobs, found it harder. In Germany unemployment stayed high until Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic government pushed through the Hartz reforms, beginning in 2003. These cut early pensions and unemployment benefits, created lower-paid job categories (“mini-jobs”), and required the unemployed to take part in job-search programmes. But in France fitful stabs at liberalisation that began in the mid-1990s were defeated or watered down by the left. The country kept a dual labour market, in which insiders have permanent contracts and full benefits and are hard to sack, and outsiders on temporary contracts have nothing. Southern European countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece have suffered from similarly rigid labour markets.

In December 2007 the European Commission adopted flexicurity as a guiding principle of its economic recommendations. The next year the global financial crisis struck, followed in 2010 by the euro crisis. Countries that had adopted flexicurity policies often saw their unemployment rates go up faster than those which strongly protected existing jobs. Yet the crisis also drove countries like Spain and Portugal, which got bail-outs, to make their labour laws more flexible. Their jobless rates are now falling faster than those of Italy, where Matteo Renzi, the prime minister from 2014 to 2016, managed only modest labour reforms before being ejected.

That has left the focus on France. Mr Macron’s great mission is to revive the French economy by shifting its labour market to a more Nordic model. His first reforms have already been approved by the National Assembly, but many in France are sceptical. “Our system continues to be focused on getting a permanent job, so you can access pensions and unemployment insurance,” says Bruno Palier of Sciences-Po, a French political science school. “Flexicurity is very far from French views.” Flexicurity’s critics have some strong arguments. Some economists challenge how much active labour-market policies have contributed to Germany’s recovery. The Hartz reforms accounted for only about 1.5 percentage points of the four-point drop in Germany’s unemployment rate from 2005 to 2009, one study found; a bigger factor was rising global demand for German products, especially in China. Another threat to welfare-state reforms is immigration. In Germany, France, Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands the share of foreign-born residents now ranges between 11% and 17%, comparable to those in traditional immigrant countries like America. Countries with greater ethnic diversity are usually believed to have stingier welfare states. Since the migration crisis of 2015, ethnic resentment against Muslims has become a leitmotif in debates about welfare-state policies. In Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany populist parties engage in “welfare chauvinism”, railing against refugees for collecting benefits at higher rates than natives. Yet such resentments do not seem to have affected European support for the welfare state. Indeed, France’s National Front, Germany’s AfD, Poland’s PiS and the like are all staunch supporters of social benefits. They use welfare-chauvinist arguments to attack immigration, not the welfare state. In a recent study of 85,000 people in regions around Europe, Bo Rothstein and Nicholas Charron, political scientists at Gothenburg University, found that ethnic diversity did not undermine support for benefits; poor governance did. In countries where citizens trusted their government, the presence of immigrants made no difference—perhaps because citizens had faith that the system would block them from free-riding.

Since the start of his presidential campaign in 2016, Mr Macron has insisted that he will balance his drive for economic efficiency with better economic protection. If he does not succeed, he could wind up as a failed reformer like Mr Renzi, leaving the terrain to figures like Ms Le Pen or the left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Their versions of welfare-state reform promise to render the labour market even more rigid, and to spend money that France does not have. It already spends 31.5% of GDP on social protection, the most in the OECD and nearly as high as Sweden at its peak. An electoral victory by Italy’s Five Star Movement in March could have a similar effect.

As for Poland’s PiS, it shows scant concern for the long-term affordability of its welfare policies. Even as Poles rapidly age, PiS is cutting the retirement age from 67 to 65 for men and 60 for women. That will further depress the ratio of workers to pensioners in a country that already suffers from mass emigration and a low fertility rate. But however misguided, such moves are popular. If liberal parties cannot devise their own credible alternatives, populists could end up winning and holding power in more European countries by promising welfare for all.