In recent years, wildfires have led to unprecedented levels of severity and damage worldwide. The co-occurence of prolonged drought and heat increases fuel dryness and amplifies wildfire risk — even in regions with historically low wildfire activity, such as Central and Northern Europe. Here, we analyze the hydrometeorological and land-surface drivers of wildfires in Europe by placing the 2003, 2017, and 2019 wildfire seasons in the context of past, present, and future climate conditions. First, we use FireCCI burned area observations, CERRA reanalysis data for hydro-climatic variables, and MODIS gross primary productivity data for fuel availability from 2001 to 2020 to identify extreme years of wildfire occurrence in the context of present climate conditions. Our findings show that the wildfire season of 2003 shows the largest burned areas in all regions, while 2017 in Southern and Central Europe and 2019 in Northern Europe show the second largest burned area. In these years, drought conditions were the most pronounced wildfire driver and additionally led to reduced gross primary productivity in Central and Southern Europe. Second, we leverage a single-model large ensemble (CESM2-LE) to assess the role of climate variability in the wildfire seasons of 2003, 2017 and 2019 and to quantify their likelihood under current and future climate conditions. We estimate the exceedance probabilities of these severe seasons in terms of their wildfire drivers (i.e. Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index, Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index, temperature) under pre-industrial, present, and future climate conditions. This approach enables us to attribute changes in both individual wildfire drivers and their co-occurrence to anthropogenic climate change. Our results highlight that hazardous wildfire conditions are becoming more frequent, particularly in Central and Northern Europe. This growing multivariate risk underscores the urgent need for targeted wildfire mitigation strategies.