Twenty minutes after midnight on June 24 2016, in the Silksworth Tennis Centre in Sunderland, England, western populism broke through. The announcement that 69 per cent of Sunderlanders had voted for Brexit made clear that Britain would eventually leave the EU. The peak western populist phase stretched through 2019 with the victories of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, and the entry of the Five Star Movement and Lega into Italy’s government.
Now all that looks like it is being reversed. Johnson lasted less than a term as prime minister despite his 80-seat majority and Five Star faces decimation in Sunday’s Italian election, while Bolsonaro will probably lose to leftist Lula next month. These populists disintegrated in office, but some others, such as the far-right Swedish Democrats and Italy’s likely next prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, are replacing them. Populism can thrive after Johnson or Trump. In fact, it is upgrading itself from something like performance art into actual administration.
“Populism” has a broadly accepted definition. Populists depict a political battle between the “good people” and the “bad elite”. Institutions like parliament or judges cannot be allowed to block “the people’s” will. But 2016-era populists were, essentially, TV performers. They had no interest in governing, not even during a pandemic. Their fantasy projects — Brexit, Trump’s wall with Mexico — collided with reality. Nor did populists exactly drain the swamp. Just this month, Johnson lost office after compulsively breaking his own lockdown rules, nativist thinker Steve Bannon exited right in handcuffs, deposed Czech billionaire prime minister Andrej Babiš is standing trial and monitoring Trump’s legal problems has become a full-time job.