Since energy prices exploded last year, the top representatives of the European Union and German government have rarely shied from giving us tips on how to save energy. German minister for economic affairs and climate Robert Habeck proudly told reporters how he cut down his showering time, while his colleague Winfried Kretschmann advised people: just put on a sweatshirt. Other popular talking points included swapping out showerheads, closing windows, washing clothes at lower temperatures, and not using an iron. Such comments reminded many of disgraced former Social Democrat Thilo Sarrazin, who once suggested that welfare recipients should just put on a thick sweater in winter instead of heating their apartments.

Everyone who struggles to pay the bills knows how useless the advice of these cynical sloganeers is. In fact, even before the inflation crisis began, low-income Europeans were forced to save as much energy as possible. Fifty-four million people in the EU do not know how they will pay their energy bills at the end of the month. Every fourth child in Europe grows up in poverty. Europe’s working class is light-years away from the climate-damaging luxury of the rich — high-powered, pompous SUVs; private jets and decadent villas with heated swimming pools.

Just how hypocritical these debates about Europeans living more sustainably really are was revealed again last month, when it emerged that the budget for European Council president Charles Michel is set to be raised to €2.6 million in 2024 — a staggering 27.5 percent increase. And what is this tax money spent on? One dinner in Brussels cost the council president a whopping €35,000. He regularly covers the short distance from Brussels to Paris or Strasbourg to Brussels on a private jet.

When the European Council president decides to conduct 64 percent of his travel in a private jet instead of taking the train or using commercial airlines for longer journeys, his wasteful luxury comes not only at the expense of the environment, but also of the European taxpayers who are forced to fund his opulent lifestyle. Thanks to the votes of the Conservatives and Liberals, Charles Michel does not even have to answer to the European Parliament for his expensive travel and dining habits.

But it’s not just about one man. The whole gang of top European politicians has utterly lost touch with the day-to-day problems and struggles of ordinary people. Being obscenely overpaid creates parallel societies of politicians who no longer feel any responsibility toward the people who elected them, but instead are all the more in touch with the big corporate lobbyists in Brussels.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s new ammunition bill will pour millions and millions of euros of public money into the pockets of the weapons industry, while the latest proposals for reforming European tax policy remain stubbornly attached to the dogma of austerity, something for which German finance minister Christian Lindner has pushed particularly hard. Europeans who can’t afford the new European Climate Law are left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, neither the German government nor the European Commission have anything to offer those who have lost what little savings they had left to the cost-of-living crisis.

Given the social crises and the deep upheavals facing European societies, we simply can’t afford business as usual any longer. If we want a Europe built on a solidarity that is more than a nice phrase in the ceremonial speeches of top political functionaries, we will have to wrench it from the claws of the corporations and the ultrarich. We must tax corporate windfall profits and extreme wealth to fund future investments in the welfare state, the climate, and a just industrial transformation. We must ban private jets and the obscene luxuries of the richest, who are given free pass after free pass to pollute the environment. We must strengthen trade unions in the struggle for fair wages and working conditions, and support tenants’ initiatives in the struggles for affordable housing and cap prices. In short, we need a socialist alternative to Europe’s failed neoliberal model.