Premature obituaries for populism

Nothing would please me better than to agree with those hailing the death of populism. Two respected pundits — Lily Lynch and Michael Lind — this week added their names to that small but growing list. Expect more. They have recent events on their side. Viktor Orbán’s stinging defeat in Hungary last month, Donald Trump’s Caligula-like second presidency and the resurgence of Canada’s Liberals all point in one direction. As does the demise of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the normalisation of Giorgia Meloni’s once populist Italian coalition. 

Lind points out that crazy-haired populists such as the UK’s Boris Johnson, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and of course Trump “campaigned as pro-worker populists and governed as pro-oligarch libertarians”. Instead of embracing “developmental economic nationalism”, they turned government into an auction house. You can only fool some of the people some of the time. Lynch argues that rightwing populism generally burns out after a decade, which is how long it takes voters to figure out they are being conned. Her postmortem lands 10 years after Britain’s exit from the EU and Trump’s first victory — 2016 being contemporary populism’s agreed starting date. Brexit has now cooled into Regrexit. 

I have two strong doubts about this uplifting prognosis. The first is about mistaking volatility for direction. Both Trump and Brexit could equally have been declared failures in 2020. Indeed, many believed that Covid was populism’s death knell. Trump was defeated 10 months into the pandemic; evidence of Brexit buyer’s remorse was also emerging by then. Neither were borne out. Trump came back four years later and Nigel Farage’s europhobic Reform UK has been leading British polls for more than a year. Polls indicate that a year from now France could elect Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella as president. People would doubtless then declare a populist resurgence. 

My second objection is that the conditions that gave rise to populism are considerably worse than they were a decade ago. The onset of AI is boosting social media’s already destructive effect on the public square. The middle-class economic malaise is more deeply entrenched. Immigration defies any delimiting measures — particularly in Britain. And the traditional centre right and centre left parties that once dominated most western liberal democracies are in even worse shape than they were in 2016. To paraphrase Gore Vidal’s quip about it not being enough to succeed, others must fail, populism cannot merely fail; other parties must succeed. But where and who are they? 

As the late Irish political scientist, Peter Mair, wrote in his seminal 2013 book, Ruling the Void, governing elites have for years been detaching from the societies they rule. Mass membership parties are a thing of the past. The civic glue that linked grassroots organisations, such as churches, unions and other social pillars, to national vehicles that compete for power has mostly dissolved. Once distinct competing grand parties increasingly resemble each other as they evolve into technocratic brands unable to fill the vacuum between the governed and the elite. Populism has filled this void. That it has also polluted society is indisputable. But simply observing that it is a cure worse than the disease is not enough. There must be a theory of the case of how to get out of our malaise. 

Observing Keir Starmer’s flailing Labour government, or Friedrich Merz’s troubled Christian Democrat-led coalition in Germany, does not fill me with confidence that non-populists have found that way out. Only Canada’s Mark Carney governs with a clear purpose, but that is because Trump has given him one. Perhaps Péter Magyar’s new government in Hungary could also fit that bill. De-Orbánising is a coherent project. But these may be straws in the wind. I am turning this week to my colleague Jim Pickard, the FT’s deputy political editor. Jim, you know British politics inside out. Has populism run its course in Britain?

Recommended reading

• On that theme, my column this week looks at Trump’s increasingly pharaonic grandiosity and asks whether he has dynastic succession in mind. “Were the 25th amendment to be used on Trump, his ejectors would surely cite the monuments he is building to himself,” I write. “‘Me,’ was Trump’s answer about the object of his proposed 250ft triumphal arch in Washington.”

• Do also read my colleague Sarah O’Connor on the great hunkering down in the jobs market, which understandably struck a chord with readers. Job attrition rates in the UK and US have fallen sharply, which is a clear sign of people’s worry about finding better employment elsewhere.

• Likewise, my colleague Robert Shrimsley struck a mordant and troubling note with his column on the shrinking of Jewish life in Britain. As he argues, it should not be hard to be critical of Israel without sinking into racist and dehumanising tropes. Yet that ancient prejudice is once again on the rise. 

Jim Pickard replies

Hi Ed. There is a theory that has been doing the rounds in Westminster that Farage’s latest populist vehicle — he has had several— is starting to lose steam. The evidence for this is that Reform UK, his right-wing, anti-immigration party, has dropped in the polls since September from 31 per cent to 24 per cent. 

Focus groups suggest that much of the support for Reform is coming from people wanting to put two fingers up to the establishment, rather than actively loving Farage himself. But — and it’s a massive but — you don’t need high levels of support in Britain right now to be the most popular party. 

And all the other parties are languishing below the 20 per cent mark, according to this Politico chart. Which means that the headlines this weekend (local elections took place on Thursday) will all be about Labour’s humiliation and Reform seizing huge numbers of seats. 

The two “main parties”, the Tories and Labour, shared 97 per cent of the vote in 1951 and 57 per cent in 2024. Their current combined polling is about a third. 

The dissatisfaction with the old duopoly has been blamed on their patchy delivery in office but this has been turbocharged by social media algorithms. 

Reform is still the major beneficiary. Coming up on the rails, however, is a newly revitalised Green Party which is a fresh manifestation of political populism in the UK, this time from the left. 

Under Zack Polanski, who won the leadership last summer, the Greens have shifted from a sleepy ecologically focused small party into a hard-left mass movement reminiscent of Corbynism a decade ago. 

So no, populism is very much not dead in the UK.

Remember that Restore Britain, which is even further to the right of Reform UK, is also polling on a not insignificant 3 per cent. And then consider that under Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, the party is moving in a more populist direction in its anti-immigration rhetoric and opposition to Net Zero. 

It is still the centrists who are very much on the back foot right now.