Just like clockwork, Europe got a brand old government. For all the talk of the continent’s rightward drift, the faces representing the European Union for the next five years look much as they always have: blue, red, yellow; Christian democrat, social democrat, liberal. Presiding over it all as president of the European Commission will be Ursula von der Leyen, who was re-elected with a comfortable majority in the European Parliament on 18 July.

The natural ritual followed the latest elections to the European Parliament, in which von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) emerged victorious, accompanied by a no less familiar second-place finish for the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), whose Antonio Costa will become president of the European Council. After post-election re-organisations the liberal bloc dropped to fifth place, but functionally serve as third winners, as their own Kaja Kallas will become the union’s top diplomat.

This trans-national ‘European coalition’ is as safe as it is familiar for the EU. The three groups – Christian and social democrats in particular – are the very same ones that conceived of and have pursued the European project since the 1950s, marked by a spirit of moderate consensus rather than sharp ideological conflict. Their backroom dealing may not be strictly democratic, but with the kind of mandate they have enjoyed historically, who can blame them?

In every election since the foundation of the European Parliament in 1979, the blocs of Christian and social democrats have come first and second. Between 1979 and 1994 the centre-left had the edge, while since 1999 that honour has gone to the centre-right. For the European Union it’s all the same, for the two groups have rarely been at loggerheads over the future of the union they have built and shaped together alongside the markedly less popular liberals.

European integration was, after all, not the product of a mass movement of Europeans demanding the unification of their continent, but a small group of political elites with a vision for a new Europe free from the political radicalism of the early 20th century. Indeed, initially, the project of European integration – really limited to just six western European countries – was driven almost entirely by the Christian Democratic parties that dominated postwar politics in five of those six (the exception being France).

At first, the Catholic roots of Christian democracy irked most socialists as well as Protestant northern Europeans. Only over subsequent decades did the European project expand to embrace not just the moderate left, but also northern Europe, post-fascist southern Europe, and post-communist Eastern Europe as well. Throughout all these great changes the moderate, transnational path to ‘ever closer union’ has remained surprisingly stable. Informal political networks have expanded, drawing together ever more parties from ever more countries, while retaining the moderate, consensual, and slightly withdrawn spirit of the European coalition born in postwar western Europe.

When, in 2002, the moment had arrived to draw up a European Constitution, this spirit of congeniality was on full display. Chairing the ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’ tasked with drafting the constitution was the liberal-conservative former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. His two vice chairmen represented the EPP and the social democratic Party of European Socialists (PES). Below them stood a 13-member praesidium consisting of representatives from the European centre-left, centre-right, and liberal centre.

In a rare moment of ideological friction, Christian democrats and secularists clashed over the question of including Christianity in the preamble. The controversy even provoked a papal intervention, with Pope John Paul II appealing directly to those drafting the European constitution to include a reference to ‘the Christian heritage of Europe’ as a ‘central and defining element’ of European history.

The pope was well aware that Europe was a rapidly secularising continent. Indeed, the visible decline at the turn of the millennium has only accelerated since then, even reaching once-devout countries such as Poland, Austria, or Slovenia. If there was a socialist equivalent of the pope, he would have been just as gloomy. The rise of neoliberalism had transformed European social democracy into a centrist ‘third-way’, which appealed more to the middle than the working class that once formed the backbone of the socialist electorate. The de-Christianising continent was also a de-industrialising one.

The Europe that Christian and social democrats built together was beginning to slip through their fingers. They remain, of course, the two strongest political forces across the continent, and by far the most established transnational ones. But despite appearances, the ‘European coalition’ is barely clinging on to power. Together, Europe’s centre-right and centre-left managed just about 40 per cent of the vote across Europe this year, a figure that stood at 56 per cent 20 years ago. For the first time ever, the EPP will even be outnumbered by MEPs to its right, divided into three groups and those too extreme for any of them.

In decades past this would have been unthinkable, but the 2010s saw Christian and social democratic parties fall to record low levels of support in many European countries, reflected in their declining share of the collective vote in elections to the European Parliament. And yet despite the political shockwaves pulsing through the continent, the politics of postwar Western Europe have somehow remained cryogenically frozen within the institutions of the European Union.

It is difficult to look at any major EU country today and conclude that this can be sustained. Every new political cycle seems to bring the decline or fall of a new political giant. That extends even to Brexit Britain, where, despite the favourable electoral system, hegemonic centre-right and centre-left have fallen to their lowest joint share of the vote since 1910. In the largest three of the European project’s original six members – Germany, France, Italy – three paths for the European coalition are being trialed: retrenchment, reconstitution, and retreat.

In Germany, a spirit of cooperative moderation still reigns across the parties of the European coalition, bolstered by the embrace of the pro-European Greens. Around a quarter of Germans intend to vote for Eurosceptic left and right, but that still leaves an increasingly fragmented political mainstream with the vast majority of votes. They hope it is their decline rather than their opponents’ rise that is temporary.

If this fails then there is reconstitution, a strategy that appears to be imploding before our eyes in France. In 2017 a young Emmanuel Macron stormed into the Élysée Palace promising to keep the radical left and right at bay. In the process he replaced the Gaullist centre-right and socialist centre-left with a new liberal force that is little more than a vessel for his personal policies. His attempt to build a European coalition of one has instead resulted in a parliament in which the largest single party is the far-right National Rally and a communist almost became speaker.

Failing retrenchment and reconstitution, the European coalition may well be faced with retreat, along with the complete and utter decimation of the transnational, trans-political networks that have built and sustained the European Union for decades. Italy offers the starkest example of such a future. As early as the 1990s its establishment imploded and fragmented, paving the way for Berlusconi’s absurdist populism, the vague syncretism of the Five Star Movement, technocratic custodianship, and the eventual triumph of the radical right.

European politics do not work in the same way as national politics, but they cannot exist in a world apart from them forever. The aggregate of declining centre-right and centre-left parties across the continent will sooner or later lead to a crisis at the very heart of the European Union. It will be forced to consider a future beyond the political coalition that created it. A post-Christian, post-industrial continent may not prove fertile ground for the eternal dominance of Christian and social democrats.