The south of Europe (France, Italy, Croatia, Greece) seems to prefer chaos, and the east (Poland, Hungary, Balkans) seems to prefer authoritarianism on the surface while turning a blind eye to social problems, especially now that they can send their worst to the west as EU citizens, free to settle where they like.
Like parts of the American South and West, there are tiny pockets of areas here in Europe, villages inhabited by AfD types, where even I as a white guy would not care to set foot. But by and large, Europe remains a continent that has been ravaged by war someplace or other for the last 2000 years.
Today's generation has not seen that on European soil since 1945 except for the Balkan war of the 1990s, and that shocked the rest of Europe so much that they never want to see it again. My father-in-law, who was drafted off his farm into the Wehrmacht at age 17 in 1942, returned from Stalingrad minus a leg a year later. He supported his son's efforts to drug himself up so horribly for his mandatory military service that he was declared unfit for the army, and made to do civil service instead (hospital orderly, or some such). His greatest wish was that his grandchildren would all be girls, so they would never be forced to enter military service (he got his wish, by the way).
He was the "slob on a farm" that Hitler Deputy Hermann Göring was talking about: "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" My father-in-law did NOT come back in one piece.
I wish the reports of angry populists in the streets would be counter-balanced by the huge number of people who want no part of them. But that doesn't glue people to their TV sets during the evening news, does it?
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