What is happening

It is no conspiracy. It is no evil plan. It is the natural outcome of forty years of democratic choices that in every generation, in every place, turned out roughly the same. Whoever owns a factory is annually taxed on wealth not yet realised. Whoever runs a factory sees his neighbours reap the fruits of it via benefits, subsidies, public services. Whoever works in a factory votes for the party that says the rich must pay more. Every step is logical, every choice is human. And together they form a projectile now going too fast to change course.

The productive class — entrepreneurs, inventors, family firms, patent holders — no longer has political representation in Europe. Not because someone silenced her. She counts less than five per cent of the electorate. In a democracy that by definition serves majorities, that is too few to carry a programme. The left has declared her the enemy. The centre-right can no longer defend her without losing votes. The populist right prefers to direct anger at migrants and Brussels — that is rhetorically more effective. Brussels produces documents fifteen per cent of which is implemented. That is no accident. That is deliberate governance within a system in which the destination lies far enough away that the bill does not have to be paid by those in charge.

In 2025 18,500 millionaires net left Europe. Sixteen and a half thousand from the United Kingdom, eight hundred from France, five hundred from Spain, four hundred from Germany, one hundred from Ireland, fifty from Sweden. They took roughly one hundred billion euros of investable wealth with them. Next year it will be more. That is not the crisis to come. That is the crisis already under way.

Whoever reads these figures for the first time thinks: surely that cannot be? And yet it is right. The sources are at the bottom of this article — Henley, Bundesbank, French Senate, DNB, CBS. Peer-reviewed figures from official registers. What you read here is no more than adding up what has already been published.

The exodus — figures from 2025 and the first half of 2026

Whoever claims the exodus is not that bad should read this chapter. The figures come not from opinion but from the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025 and 2026, the Bundesbank, the French Senate, Spain's The Objective, the Dutch DNB and the bankruptcy statistics of French industry.

United Kingdom — the largest exodus ever measured

France — for the first time negative

Germany — for the first time negative

Netherlands — net still positive, industry negative

Italy — the great winner

Spain — 500 gone, industry draining

Belgium — industry closes, capital-gains tax begins

Sweden — industry drains away

Ireland — still a magnet, but pharma pauses

Portugal — the other winner in jobs

Added up — Europe in one year

Adding the published European losses for 2025: UK −16,500, France −800, Spain −500, Germany −400, Norway −150, Ireland −100, Sweden −50. Total: net −18,500 millionaires in one year. Worldwide, 142,000 millionaires relocated in 2025 — a record. For 2026 Henley forecasts 165,000 worldwide. For European countries Henley publishes no more figures in 2026, only a qualitative compass. The direction is the same. The figures have simply become too embarrassing to put in writing.

And behind those 18,500 millionaires stand factories. In Germany alone: minus 341,500 industrial jobs since 2019, of which minus 124,100 in 2025. In France: from +9,500 net job creation in 2024 to +310 in 2025 — nearly zero. At Volkswagen alone: 37,000 jobs gone, 50,000 announced, 45,000 at risk. At BASF: 7,000 worldwide. Audi Brussels: 3,000. Volvo Ghent: two thirds threatened, 3,300 new jobs in Košice. Stellantis Poissy: 925. GKN Köping: 500. Aegon Schiphol: 250. Legrand: 74 net. Husqvarna Brastad: 104. HydraSpecma: 50. Abu Garcia: 48. Add these nameless, and they become statistics. Add them by name and municipality, and it becomes an exodus that fits on one A4.

Why it works this way

Three patterns, everywhere the same.

The left takes with moral certainty. Coherent story, reliable base, cultural hegemony. Whoever opposes "the strong must contribute more" bears the burden of proof.

The centre-right bends along. Cannot explain why taxing wealth is different from taxing income. The technical difference — you tax profit when it is realised, not wealth that does not yet exist — is impossible to sell to an electorate that thinks in soundbites. So they vote for what they rhetorically oppose.

The populist right points, does not build. Migration, Brussels, "the elite" — never the plunder itself. Even a right-wing breakthrough would not stop the plunder; it would only change the scapegoat.

And Brussels turns in neutral. Of the €800 billion per year Draghi prescribed in 2024, fifteen per cent has been realised in two years. The European Banking Federation reported on 10 June 2026 that the "competitiveness bill" now stands at €1.4 trillion — almost doubled while the meetings go on.

The Commission can do nothing because it is unable to. Five structural reasons:

• No taxing power. Fiscal sovereignty lies with the member states. Recommend yes, enforce no.
• Wrong timeline. Seven-year budgets, 2030 plans, 2035 roadmaps. The 16,500 British millionaires who left last year do not come back because a new MFF cycle begins in 2034.
• Caught between member states. Large countries want coordination up, small countries want their own fiscal room. The Commission cannot serve both and therefore does nothing that makes a difference.
• Does not understand production. Lawyers, economists, political scientists. No engineers, no factory managers, no patent holders. Documents produce no prosperity.
• Serves itself. Strong member states do not need Brussels. Weak ones do. A strong Europe is for the Commission an existential problem.

On 3 June 2026 the Commission presented its European Semester Spring Package. Mînzatu and Dombrovskis spoke of an "important shift". The recommendations are worded so that a trade-union leader reads solidarity into them and an entrepreneur reads deregulation. Both are right. There is nothing in them.

The pilots of the projectile

These are not culprits. This is worse. These are the leaders deliberately steering towards the abyss — not because they want the abyss, but because the abyss does not interest them. What interests them is winning votes and not losing votes. The rest is nebenbei. Sideline. Far past their own term. Something for a successor.

That is the core. A politician who cries "let the rich pay" is less dangerous if he simply does not understand it. He is more dangerous if he does understand it and does it anyway, because it wins votes and the alternative costs votes. He is a pilot who knows his course leads to a mountain and keeps to that course because his passengers chose him for it. The mountain comes later. The next election comes sooner.

The statements below are public, documented, dated. Each of these figures steers the rocket with a firm hand. Each of them knows the destination. For each of them the destination is nebenbei — a problem for later years, later cabinets, later generations. These are the mandates the voter has sent them into the cockpit with.

Netherlands

Germany

France

Brussels

The historical end-point

History knows one pattern that resembles this exodus: France before 1789. There too the rich withdrew — some literally outside France (in Dutch, English and German exile), others behind the walls of their estates. There too the taxation of the propertied class kept pace with its retreat. There too the poor remained with the bill and without the factory in which they worked. And when that process had advanced far enough, the guillotine came — not because someone had wanted to use it, but because the pattern produces its own end. Whoever withdraws during the plunder is not found on the scaffold. Only those who leave too late.

1789 — the pattern that produces its own end

The guillotine on the Place de la Révolution. The rich who left too late ended on the scaffold; those who went earlier could save their wealth. Around the scaffold the poor gathered — still poor, still hungry, thinned by the plunder they had themselves demanded. The pattern of 2026 shows the same steps in the same order — only accelerated by digital capital flows that did not yet exist in 1789.

The working European sits on a chair he pulls out from under himself — not from stupidity, but from the logic of his own interest as his party defines it. Every vote for "let the rich pay" is a vote that brings the factory where he works closer to Košice, Bruneck, Delaware or Dubai. Every time a union calls an entrepreneur a profiteer, a pension premium disappears faster than the union can negotiate. The union does not know that. It does its work.

They wait for the train to Singapore, Dubai, Texas, Lugano, Ticino. Eighteen thousand of them left last year already. Next year it will be more. In 1789 the same movement took three decades. In 2026 it takes three years, because capital now travels faster than a coach on the road to Koblenz.

Close

There is no accusation in this article. There is an observation. The pilots of this projectile are neither criminals nor fools. They are intelligent, highly educated people who know the figures in this article — many of them know them better than its readers. And they hold course.

That is not punishable. That is not even incomprehensible. For a politician one rationality applies: win votes and do not lose votes. Everything else — economic sustainability, factories that leave, capital flows that change track, historical parallels that loom — is nebenbei. Sideline. Outside the column "re-election". In a democracy that serves majorities, and in which the productive class makes up less than five per cent, this rationality is unavoidable. The problem is not that the pilots do not know what they are doing. The problem is that what they do is exactly the rational — for them. For the rocket it is fatal.

We built this ourselves. We vote. We support. We look away. For the productives the way out lies outside Europe. For us, who chose this ourselves, there is no way out any more. The rocket flies on, and at some point it lands. Where and when — history teaches us. How: that is up to us, in the last years in which it is still up to us.