Part IThe Analog European
The average European will not freely choose a bucolic, analog life: it will be imposed on them through prices and regulatory restrictions.
The paradox is brutal: while citizens of the US or China will increase their per-capita kilowatt-hour consumption to power autonomous vehicles, heavy home automation and local AI agents running 24/7, Europeans will enter a forced austerity disguised as ecological virtue.
The European way of life over the next decade will be shaped by these dynamics:
1. Mobility: The return to life within walking distance
The private car will go from a middle-class right to a luxury item reserved for the top decile.
- The electric car trap: Europe banned the combustion engine de facto without guaranteeing cheap energy or its own battery supply chains. A mid-range electric car costs between 35,000 and 50,000 euros, unaffordable on stagnant real wages.
- Urban restrictions: Low Emission Zones (LEZ), urban tolls, the removal of parking spaces and 30 km/h limits.
- The result for the average citizen will be overcrowded public transport, pricier regional trains, the bicycle and the "15-minute city" model, not because of avant-garde urban planning, but because travelling more than 30 km in your own vehicle will cost a fortune in charging and tolls.
2. Access to AI: The gap between basic consumption and the frontier
Europeans will not be left without internet, but they will use second-division AI:
- Delayed or censored access: Big Tech already rolls out late in Europe. When a frontier model launches in North America or Asia, it reaches Europe months later, with features stripped out or blocked outright to dodge investigations under the AI Act and by local data protection agencies.
- Prohibitive costs for local compute: Running high-powered open models on your own workstation takes thousands of watts, constantly. The cost of residential kWh (already around €0.25–0.40/kWh in several countries, against $0.12–0.15 in much of the US) will make owning the hardware prohibitive.
- The ordinary user will be relegated to lightweight web clients and basic assistants bundled into expensive monthly subscriptions, paying a toll for compute processed thousands of kilometres away.
3. Home and consumption: Efficiency through rationing
Material comfort at home will adapt to the rigidity of the grid:
- Punitive dynamic tariffs: Running the washing machine, the air conditioning or heat-pump heating during peak industrial demand will be punished with savage tariffs.
- Remote load control: With grids at their limit, operators are already designing schemes to throttle or remotely disconnect home chargers and heat pumps during demand peaks.
- Less climate control: The norm in southern and central Europe will be to turn thermostats down in winter and endure the heat in summer. What other latitudes solve with air conditioning at scale will be sold here as "climate resilience".
4. The narrative: Turning scarcity into moral superiority
When a system cannot produce material abundance, it turns to ideology to justify scarcity.
- Energy poverty will be labelled "conscious degrowth", "digital sobriety" and "sustainable living".
- Walking to the local market, wearing second-hand clothes and repairing ten-year-old appliances will be celebrated, not as symptoms of lost purchasing power against Asia or North America, but as signs of ethical sophistication and civilisational progress.
The average European will live in an environment of high security, beautiful cities, good food and excellent basic social cohesion, but technologically peripheral: with less geographic mobility, less personal computing power and a ceiling on energy consumption firmly administered by the State.
Part IIMilitarily, how will Europe fare over the next decade?
Europe will be a dependent military protectorate that spends twice the money to get half the operational capability.
Raising defence budgets to 2% or 3% of GDP does not fix three decades of doctrinal, industrial and technological atrophy. Europe's next military decade is defined by four realities:
Continues in the full report →
Part IIIPolitically, is there a chance of a right-wing bloc running the EU in the next decade?
Yes, and in fact the balance of power already points exactly that way.
Over the next decade, the probability that a coalition dominated by the traditional right (EPP) and the sovereigntist/conservative right (ECR and Patriots) controls the EU's political agenda is very high.
Continues in the full report →
Part IVJust as screwed even if the right governs?
Just as screwed, only with different rhetoric.
Changing the political colour does not change physics or demography. The right can halt delirious climate directives and harden borders, but it has no magic wand to reverse thirty years of structural atrophy.