Now, it is France’s turn. French Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government has fallen in a confidence vote after just 90 days, triggering a political crisis and calls for the resignation of President Emmanuel Macron. It follows the recent collapse of the German government. And, come to that, the fall of almost every incumbent government in Europe.

In each case, there are local causes, but there is also an underlying theme. The money has run out. The lockdowns, which were more severe in Europe than in the United States, were not only expensive in themselves. They also altered the relationship between state and citizen, leading to higher expectations of government support.

If the state could splash out all that money in furlough payments, then why shouldn’t it subsidize people’s energy bills? If energy bills, why not mortgages? Voters are demanding more goodies at precisely the moment when the cash has run out.

In France, the government fell over its attempt to bring the budget deficit down from 6.4% to 5%, which required a combination of tax rises and spending cuts worth around $60 billion.

France is famous for its generous social entitlements and weak fiscal control. Its budget has not been in balance since 1974. But it is less of an outlier than we might imagine. The same problem has been creeping up in all European countries.

The problem, simply stated, is that no party can get itself elected if it is honest about the economic situation. Voters have become habituated to handouts. They are not willing to consider trade-offs, to accept that they cannot simultaneously have lower taxes, higher benefits, and stable prices. Candidates who come clean about the fiscal challenge are outbid by rivals who airily promise that everything can be magically extracted from energy companies or the top 1% or tax dodgers or tariffs.

It is becoming harder and harder to win a second term. You get elected promising to make people better off. You run up against exactly the same problems as the outgoing administration. Disillusion sets in. A new party comes forward, promising to be on the side of ordinary people instead of self-interested elites. And the cycle begins again.

What has changed? After all, governments used to be able to get themselves reelected on the basis of competent performance. A generation ago, voters did not expect miracles. Peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice were usually enough.

The immediate causes of the crisis are the unacknowledged costs of, first, the lockdowns and, second, the net zero targets. Even now, few European politicians understand that energy is not simply one among many commodities. It is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, and the vector of economic growth. The story of human civilization is really the story of falling fuel prices, as our ancestors were relieved from drudgery, first by coal and then by oil.

But there is a deeper problem. The date of that last French budget surplus, 1974, is significant. It marked the end of what the French called “les trente glorieuses,” the three decades of exceptional growth that followed the end of World War II. Most Europeans experienced the same thing, as people moved to cities and became middle-class consumers. The Germans called it the “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle.

The 1974 oil shock marked its end. But the deeper problem was demographic. People were living longer, and around 1970, they stopped having babies. An older population is always likely to be less innovative and less energetic. But the worst of it is that the ratio of workers to pensioners, already at a record low, is about to become unsustainable. European governments, unable to get a rise in the pension age past their voters, have instead imported workers from the rest of the world, a policy that, of course, brings problems of its own.

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The U.S. has sensibly avoided lumbering itself with expensive energy, and its demographic outlook is rosier than Europe’s. But it is not wholly immune to the same challenges. The last U.S. election was, in global terms, remarkably unremarkable. The governing party was blamed for rising prices and was no more successful than other incumbent parties in arguing that these costs came from a lockdown policy that voters themselves had supported.

Voters don’t want to take responsibility for such things. In our screen-addled, impatient age, an electorate that spends an average of seven seconds on each TikTok video wants easy solutions and prefers candidates who offer them. Only, I fear, when the economy has completely crashed, will they be jolted from their illusions. It won’t be pretty.