Ever since populist-nationalism – or national-populism, if you like – broke through the establishment barriers in 2015/16 with Trump and Brexit, the general opinion has been that “traditional politics” has been upended and that we are now in a “new world”. But is that true, or is it all just a passing storm or perhaps an experiment to be followed by a reversion, if not to the status quo ante, then at least to some form of safer, quieter, indeed more moderate politics? After all, ten years is a mere blink of an eye at the scale of history.
A great political realignment is seen, quite correctly so far, to have taken place during this period. Disaffected communities – Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables”, a valid descriptor outside the US, too – which were a core section of the Left’s coalition switched their vote to the new right-wing forces. They were joined by a large swathe of the centre-right voting bloc who had always self-identified as conservatives, either culturally or economically in the classic-liberal sense, or both. Crudely put, these two streams, from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, combined to form the new populist electorate – and, in the process, to weaken the mainstream parties.
The key reasons which produced these electoral defections from the old Left and Right are well understood, albeit the mix and dosage has varied on each side. But, broadly speaking, the ingredients of discontent include things like the pressure of uncontrolled immigration on wages and on community cohesion; the pressure of “woke” on national culture and public life, with the attempted “re-education” of the public, the censorship, and the increasing restrictions on freedoms; and the encroachment of globalist attitudes, “human rights”, “values” and policies – especially climate change – on the Nation State, with the practical loss of sovereignty and the denunciation of national feeling as wrong, racist or even fascist.
All these are vital problems to which pluralities or majorities of the people want and deserve practical solutions. In the US and Europe populist party rhetoric has done a thorough job at exposing the full depth of the political establishment’s failure. The responsibility and blame for the state in which Western countries are now in has been pinned rather firmly on the mainstream parties, or at least on the elites controlling them. After all, it all happened on their watch; they were the ones in charge as the woke globalist rot set in and rapidly spread through our institutions, economy, society, laws and culture.
So where are the results? Why haven’t the populists taken over, at least in Europe? The United States is of course the great exception, but for many reasons – size, complexity, money – its electoral dynamics are a special case among democracies. Despite what we tend to believe because of Hollywood and the global obsession with US politics, very little of the latter is applicable in Europe. A severe misunderstanding of this fact has been the cause of many a disappointment in the careers of European copycats of American politicians or campaigns. Trump’s success aside, major populist takeovers are conspicuous by their general absence.
In Europe, Meloni’s sole notable victory is the exception that proves the rule, and even her style of governing is closer in practice to classical conservatism than to any kind of disruptive populism. In foreign affairs, at least, her policies have been closely elite-aligned. As for Viktor Orbán, the dean of populist leaders, his ascent to power preceded the neo-populist age altogether.
All in all, the great populist wave – also called “far right” by its centrist/leftist critics when they don’t entirely give in to the full superiority of their self-declared moral rectitude and stoop for the “fascist” label, or worse – has not come to much, by the main measure of success, i.e. that of getting control of actual government power. Election after EU election also fails to return a Eurosceptic majority with a real chance of threatening the EU integrationist project, despite constant incremental gains.
If anything, for odd and varied reasons, it is the old mainstream which has produced the biggest surprises recently, from Labour’s 2024 landslide victory in the UK to Mark Carney’s unlikely triumph in Canada last year. Then there is of course Merz’s win in Germany two years ago, in which he actually increased the old conservative alliance’s number of seats in the Bundestag.
A full decade into this age of electoral upheaval, the problem with the idea of “insurgent parties” and the “new” anti-establishment movements is that it’s all beginning to feel a bit old-hat by now. The novelty factor is pretty much gone. After all, how long can a “revolutionary moment” last? A new force bent on “revolution” and riding on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment can perhaps get away with less scrutiny at first when voters are desperate for any kind of change. But having failed to storm the heights of political office at the first push (unlike Trump, who won right away), in many countries the populist parties have become just another part of the political furniture, and are now increasingly seen that way by the swing voters they desperately need to win.
If 2016 was the start of a great political war for the soul of the West, the blitzkrieg phase has come and gone – won by the defenders – and now it’s a war of attrition. This has several consequences that are detrimental to the populist cause. First, there is extended time for more scrutiny: Not only of the populist leaders and candidates, but of their parties’ proposed solutions too. Second, the “enemy” – the establishment – got a stay of execution and thus gained the chance to adjust some of its policies, borrowing from the populist playbook. In Britain, for example, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights is now official Tory policy – something unimaginable for this party even two years ago.
Third, over a decade there is bound to churn at the top of any party; the early leaders have to contend with more challenges to their authority, perhaps even with defections and breakaway factions. A failure to get into government will also inspire, in time, the rise of other populist parties who will claim that the “first-generation” populists are yesterday’s news and there is a need for an alternative.
In a political war of attrition like this, the institutional advantage of the older, establishment parties begins to count for more. Their donor and media networks tend to be more resilient, so that perhaps the network of party branches can remain more competitive at the local level, where the “old brand” matters more than tends to do in national campaigns. Then, they have time to infiltrate or otherwise destabilise their populist opponents through investigations, engineered defections and other tactics.
Most importantly, the passage of time allows the mainstream parties to put some distance between them and their past errors. They can (and many do) adopt some of the populist rhetoric, they get rid of and even condemn their own previous leaders, and make a big fuss of a grand programme of renewal. Today, when the voters’ memories are so short, a few years of “internal reform” can result in a new lease of life even for parties that had sunk very low in the polls previously.
Over and above all these difficulties there is the fundamental challenge at the heart of post-2016 populist politics which none of these parties has really solved but, at best, only managed to paper over for now: Finding an economic policy that can satisfy both the Left and Right components of their core electorate. Like the proverbial squaring of the circle, it cannot really be done. Promise better public services, better wages, industrial policy and the like to your left-wing working class voters in deprived areas, and you lose the right-wing ones – not to mention big business – who generally want lower taxes, more fiscal responsibility, cuts to welfare and pro-business policies.
A populist electoral coalition formed from voters originally drawn from the Left and Right outer margins of the spectrum – so, not from the centre-left or centre-right – is hard-to-impossible to satisfy under any serious economic plan. There are only three alternatives. Either the economic plan is not serious and you try to campaign and win on other issues (woke, sovereignism, etc); this strategy usually collapses under fire in a heated election. Or, number two, you are in America where you can square the circle and promise both more spending and lower taxes because you have the dollar and the mighty US deficit on your side (this, by the way, is another reason why lessons from US politics do not apply in Europe.) The third option is to soften, muddle, and find ways to attract people from the centre – but that takes you away from populism.
In 2026, at the ten-year mark on the neo-populist timeline, the noise from the anti-establishment Right is as loud as it ever was but the signal carrying clear information about their actual solutions on the hard issues – and, critically, the people who would implement them – remains rather faint. Meanwhile, many voters are growing tired of the escalating rhetoric and of the increasingly uncivil debate, for which they will (rather unfairly) mostly blame the populists.
With nothing much to show for it, and time now working against them, Europe’s main “hard Right” parties are entering a tricky period. It wouldn’t take much for their poll ratings to begin an inexorable decline over the coming months and years. Many of their policy grievances are now actually beginning to be addressed by the governing classes, though certainly too slowly and insufficiently. But there is movement, in some quarters, on more immigration restrictions, even on green regulations (in the EU!), on restoring manufacturing and so on.
Furthermore, internationally, globalism and the “liberal order” are now effectively buried – thanks in large part to Trump – with epitaphs on their passing delivered by world leaders at Davos and at the Munich Security Conference. This is depriving populists of a major attack angle, and worse, it is filling the gap with the theme of “patriotic national defence” which the establishment parties are busy taking possession of.
In these circumstances, it is not hard to see how things could take yet another turn, perhaps in conjunction with new political winds generated by the US midterm elections. Mainstream conservative parties could well begin to revive during the current electoral cycle under new and more competent leadership with serious, pragmatic plans free from the woke excesses of the past and calibrated to restore a wider centre-right coalition of voters but on a refreshed and harder set of principles.
So much of politics is about momentum: Once lost, it can be difficult to recover. The populists have been enjoying a long stint at the forefront of the political debate, as the threat-in-waiting to the incumbent elites; but it would be a mistake to assume this can last forever. The other side has its own cards to play.
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