I am also a European. Our oligarchy looks different for sure (and look into the history of pedophile scandals in Belgium, BTW).

I am not as optimistic as you. We seem to be stagnating our way into a stark choice between becoming an American tech vassal, a Chinese tech vassal, or losing out the remnants of our ability to compete on the world markets. Half of the continent borrows money at an unsustainable rate in order to pay millions of people to do nothing for decades.

We have made decisions that looked reasonable at the time they were made, but too much has changed in the meantime and now we are stuck in bad equilibria.

The Bismarckian pay-as-you-go pension system was stable as long as people had plenty of kids and died, on average, a few years after retiring. Now they have one kid and spend 20 years in retirement before they die. The maths of that system just does not work out anymore.

The European highly regulated industry was king as long as the rest of the world had no other choice, but now that Asia has industrialized, they are blowing us out of the water. First with lower prices, but now also with quality. German exports are half of what they used to be, with another halving expected. And of course without exports, our current social spending cannot be sustained either - you cannot keep such a massive redistribution mechanism running on an economy based on selling each other cups of coffee in a beach bar.

Our most talented engineers tend to move abroad and stay there. Brain drain is one of the most serious things that can happen to a country or a continent, and we are suffering from it.

We just cannot continue to live like that, something will have to yield, but many voters just don't want to hear that.