The recent failure of the European Union’s "Tax the Rich" campaign is the clearest example of how current leftwing parties are all bark and no bite.
In a year in which, despite suffering losses to the conservatives, 36 million Europeans showed up to the polls to support leftwing parties in June's European Parliament elections, an EU-wide initiative to tax great wealth to finance the ecological and social transition fell flat.
This stark contrast between electoral support and civic engagement reveals a deeper paradox in European progressive politics.
The European Citizens' Initiative, spearheaded by Belgian Socialist Party president Paul Magnette and backed by influential figures like economist Thomas Piketty and Austrian heiress Marlène Engelhorn, proposed a solution to make sure the wealthy pay a 'fair share' that elegantly cut through the meanders of EU legislation.
Legal experts claimed it to be a politically difficult but practically feasible three-step plan.
First, it called for new legislation establishing a European Tax on Great Wealth, arguing that national disparities in taxing the super-rich are undermining fiscal unity within the Union and creating distortions in the single market.
Second, it proposed amending a 2020 European Council decision that outlined which resources the EU can draw on for its budget, adding the capacity to generate a new “own resource” through this tax, thus decreasing its dependency on funding from member states.
Finally, it earmarked the funds raised through this process for implementing a just ecological transition, introducing an indirectly redistributive element to the EU budget.
But in the end, the initiative stopped short of the one million signature mark, collecting just slightly more than 300,000 and surpassing the required national quotas in only three of seven member states.
This happened at the same time as progressive parties were publishing manifestos for the European Parliament elections that often contained initiatives not far off from the “Tax the Rich” proposal.
Both the European Greens and European Left made direct mentions of working to find ways to implement an EU-wide wealth tax to fund essential investments, while the Party of European Socialists (PES) stopped short of a similar declaration, only including a vague claim that the ultra-rich must pay their fair share in their programme announced in Rome back in March of 2024.
The very reluctance of the PES to include a direct mention of a wealth tax in its elections programme while one of its party leaders was actively campaigning for such a policy probably doomed the project.
The calculated timidity from the EU’s main centre-left force effectively isolated the initiative of its Belgian members, depriving it of crucial party infrastructure and grassroots support and disincentivizing other progressive groups from backing an external initiative.
The campaign's demise reveals an uncomfortable truth about EU progressive politics. As the European Union struggles to find the necessary resources to invest in its future, as outlined in the Draghi Report, the inability to mobilize support for wealth redistribution is not just a political defeat.
It's a damning indictment of the progressive movement's organisational capacity.
Some of the blame can rest on the fundamental limitations of the European Citizens' Initiative, a relatively new tool of direct democracy that has been able to collect millions of signatures while delivering only partial victories at best.
That being said, the real issue is that the "Tax the Rich" campaign failed before ever encountering the challenging political arena of a conservative-dominated parliament and commission.
It couldn't even gather the basic democratic support required to force these institutions to engage with the proposal. In a continent where the richest 10 percent own an incredible 67 percent of the wealth, while the bottom half of adults possess only 1.2 percent of it, this collapse demonstrates that when confronted with real opportunities for economic reform, Europe's progressive parties prefer rhetorical flourishes to meaningful action.
Looking forward, the prospects for any kind of wealth tax implementation have dimmed considerably in the last few months.
The rightward shift in European politics, with radical-right parties now in coalition governments across multiple member states, creates an increasingly hostile environment for progressive economic reforms.
At the same time, national-level wealth taxes continue to face significant limitations, as recent cases in the UK, Spain, and Norway show that the wealthy can easily relocate to more tax-friendly jurisdictions resulting in lost revenues and exacerbating regional inequalities.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House next week, any hope for coordinated global action on wealth taxation, like the one proposed by economist Gabriel Zucman to the G20 will be put on hold for the length of his administration.
As the world's wealthiest continue to exploit mobility and tax havens to avoid contributing their fair share, progressive parties face a stark choice: either develop more effective strategies for implementing wealth taxation or watch economic inequality continue to undermine democratic institutions and social cohesion.
Pietro Valetto is a PhD Researcher at Antwerp University's Center for Social Policy, specialising in the effects of asset testing in welfare systems across the EU and US.
Pietro Valetto is a PhD Researcher at Antwerp University's Center for Social Policy, specialising in the effects of asset testing in welfare systems across the EU and US.