What is happening

It is not a conspiracy. It is not a malicious plan. It is the natural outcome of forty years of democratic choices that turned out roughly the same for every generation, everywhere. Anyone who owns a factory is taxed each year on wealth that has not yet been realised. Anyone who runs a factory sees their neighbours reap the benefits through welfare payments, subsidies and public services. Anyone who works in a factory votes for the party that says the rich should pay more. Every step is logical, every choice is human. Together, they form a projectile now travelling too fast to change course.

The productive class — entrepreneurs, inventors, family businesses, patent holders — no longer has political representation in Europe. Not because anyone has silenced it. It accounts for less than five per cent of the electorate. In a democracy that by definition serves majorities, that is too little to sustain a programme. The left has declared it the enemy. Centre-right parties can no longer defend it without losing votes. The populist right would rather direct its anger at migrants and Brussels — rhetorically, that is more effective. Brussels produces documents, fifteen per cent of which are implemented. That is no accident. It is deliberate governance within a system in which the destination lies far enough away that those making the decisions do not have to pay the bill themselves.

In 2025, a net 18,500 millionaires 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 approximately €100 billion in investable wealth with them. Next year there will be more. This is not the crisis that is coming. It is the crisis already under way.

Anyone reading these figures for the first time thinks: surely that cannot be right? And yet it is. The sources are listed at the bottom of this article — Henley, Bundesbank, Sénat français, DNB, CBS. Peer-reviewed figures from official registers. What you are reading here is no more than the addition of figures that have already been published.

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

Anyone claiming that the exodus is not so 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 Sénat, the Spanish Objective, the Dutch DNB and the French industry's bankruptcy statistics.

United Kingdom — the largest exodus ever recorded

France — negative for the first time

Germany — negative for the first time

Netherlands — still positive on net, industry negative

Italy — the big winner

Spain — 500 leave, industry drains away

Belgium — industry shuts down, capital-gains tax begins

Sweden — industry is being hollowed out

Ireland — still a magnet, but pharma pauses

Portugal — the other winner in jobs

Added up — Europe in one year

Adding up 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 is no longer publishing figures in 2026, but a qualitative compass. The direction is the same. The figures have simply become too embarrassing to put on paper.

And those 18,500 millionaires come with factories. In Germany alone: 341,500 fewer industrial jobs since 2019, including 124,100 fewer in 2025. In France: from +9,500 net jobs created in 2024 to +310 in 2025 — almost 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 Gent: 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 up without names, and they become statistics. Add them with names and municipalities, and it becomes an exodus that fits on a single sheet of paper.

Why it works this way

Three patterns, the same everywhere.

The left lays claim with moral certainty. A coherent story, a reliable base, cultural hegemony. Anyone who argues against “the strong must contribute more” carries the burden of proof.

The centre-right bends with it. It 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, but does not build. Migration, Brussels, “the elite” — never the plunder itself. Even a right-wing breakthrough would not stop the plunder; it would merely change the scapegoat.

And Brussels shifts into neutral. Of the €800 billion a year that Draghi prescribed in 2024, 15 percent has been realised in two years. The European Banking Federation reported on 10 June 2026 that the “competitiveness bill” now amounts to €1.4 trillion — nearly doubled while the meetings continue.

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

• No tax powers. Fiscal sovereignty lies with the member states. It can recommend, but not enforce.
• Wrong timetable. Seven-year budgets, 2030 plans, 2035 roadmaps. The 16,500 British millionaires who left last year will not return because a new MFK cycle begins in 2034.
• Hemmed in between member states. Large countries want coordination from above; small countries want their own fiscal space. The Commission cannot serve both, and so does nothing that makes a difference.
• It does not understand production. Lawyers, economists, political scientists. No engineers, no factory directors, no patent holders. Documents do not produce prosperity.
• It serves itself. Strong member states do not need Brussels. Weak ones do. A strong Europe is an existential problem for the Commission.

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

The Pilots of the Projectile

These are not guilty parties. This is worse. These are the leaders who knowingly steer toward 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. A side issue. Far beyond their own terms in office. Something for a successor.

That is the crux. 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 while the alternative costs votes. He is a pilot who knows his course ends at a mountain and sticks to that course because his passengers elected him for it. The mountain comes later. The next election comes sooner.

The statements below are public, documented, and dated. Each of these figures is steering the rocket with a steady hand. Each of them knows the destination. For each of them, the destination is nebenbei—a problem for the years ahead, for future cabinets, for future generations. These are the mandates with which voters sent them to the cockpit.

Netherlands

Germany

France

Brussels

The historical end point

History knows one pattern resembling this exodus: France before 1789. There too, the rich withdrew — some literally beyond France (in Dutch, English and German exile), others behind the walls of their estates. There too, taxation of the propertied class kept pace with its withdrawal. There too, the poor were left with the bill and without the factory in which they worked. And when that process had advanced far enough, the guillotine arrived — not because anyone had wanted to use it, but because the pattern produces its own end. Those who withdraw during the plundering are 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 up on the scaffold; those who went earlier could save their wealth. The poor gathered around the scaffold — still poor, still hungry, thinned out by the plundering they themselves had demanded. The pattern of 2026 follows the same steps in the same order — only accelerated by digital capital flows that did not yet exist in 1789.

The working European is sitting on a chair he is pulling out from under himself — not out of stupidity, but out of the logic of his own interests as defined by his party. Every vote for "let the rich pay" is a vote bringing the factory where he works closer to Košice, Bruneck, Delaware or Dubai. Every time a trade union calls an entrepreneur a profiteer, a pension contribution disappears faster than the union can negotiate. The union does not know that. It is doing its job.

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

Conclusion

There is no indictment 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 stay the course.

That is not criminal. It is not even incomprehensible. For a politician, there is only one rationality: winning votes and not losing them. Everything else—economic sustainability, factories moving away, capital flows changing direction, historical parallels looming—is nebenbei. A side issue. Outside the “reelection” column. In a democracy that serves majorities, and in which the productive class accounts for less than five percent, this rationality is inevitable. The problem is not that the pilots do not know what they are doing. The problem is that what they are doing is precisely the rational thing—for them. For the rocket, it is fatal.

We built this ourselves. We vote. We support. We look away. For the productive, the way out lies beyond Europe. For us, who chose this ourselves, there is no way out anymore. The rocket keeps flying, and at some point it lands. Where and when, history will teach us. How: that is up to us, in the final years in which it is still up to us.