While watching farmers protest in Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Germany during the early months of 2024, I was reminded of Wordsworth’s words: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” Tom, a Flemish farmer who drove his tractor to Brussels in February to protest against proposed environmental laws, told me that the media tried to scare off the public from supporting his cause by calling his movement far right and populist. He smiled and said, “They call me a populist—fine, I’ll take that!”
Tom has never been interested in politics, but like hundreds of thousands of people, he decided that he wanted his voice to be heard. In the course of 2024, populism demonstrated that it had a formidable staying power. In the European Union, populist parties put the political establishment on the defensive. In the United States, it was the sprawling MAGA movement and not the old Republican establishment that bore responsibility for the victory of Donald Trump.
“The populist moment of 2024 was a long time coming.”
Yet the populist moment of 2024 was a long time coming. Its influence has been growing in Europe since the turn of the century. According to a 2022 study conducted by more than 100 political scientists for the security firm Solace Global, around 32 percent of Europeans had voted for anti-establishment parties. This was a significant increase from 20 percent in the early 2000s and 12 percent in the early 1990s. Since the publication of this study, the influence of populism has continued to expand, leading to its impressive surge this year.
The election to the European Parliament in June 2024 showed that populism had established a formidable presence on the Continent. The outcome of this election saw 60 populist parties from 26 European Union member states gaining representation in the European Parliament. These parties won 263—roughly 36 percent—of 720 seats. Right-wing-populist parties in France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Holland did particularly well, while left-wing ones received less support.
To this day, mainstream commentators frequently express the hope that populism is a passing fad. “Has Europe reached peak populism?” asked a commentator in Politico in 2019, before declaring that the “tide may have turned against nationalist right.” Five years later—especially in the aftermath of the re-election of Donald Trump—it is evident that populism possesses considerable forward momentum.
Many analysts have underestimated the resilience of populism because they fail to grasp its main driver. They constantly associate the growth of populism with bigotry and racism. However, what they characterize this way is a sense of cultural insecurity brought on by people’s concern about the devaluation of their national communities.
Left-wing commentators invariably argue that neoliberal policies are to blame for the rise of populism. Economic inequality and poverty are often perceived as the terrain on which populism flourishes. That is why the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany argues that public investment is the antidote to populism. It concluded in its 2024 report that since regions receiving financial support see right-wing populist vote share fall by 15 to 20 percent, investment is the way forward. Yet there is considerable evidence that the growth of populist parties has occurred independently of economic crisis and stagnation. This point is made in a recent report from Timbro, a free-market think tank, which concludes that “support for populist parties has grown somewhat independently of economic crises or growth.”
The rise of populism in Europe is intimately linked to the implosion of the center-left and center-right parties that have dominated the continent since the late 1940s. The parties that used to dominate the political landscape—the social democrats, Christian democrats, socialists, and communists—barely exist. In Austria, France, Holland, Italy, and Germany, the populist parties enjoy greater electoral support than the socialists, and often surpass the center-right.
What has occurred is not simply a loss of trust in the mainstream political establishment but also a new level of cultural polarization in which values imposed from above are put to question. The coincidence of a crisis of authority with the outbreak of cultural conflict has created the condition for the flourishing of populism. In the legacy media, there is a tendency to confuse the cause of polarization with its symptom. It ignores the responsibility of Europe’s political establishment for provoking an all-pervasive cultural conflict over values. Invariably, the populist wave is blamed for the polarization of society. But the populist moment emerged in response to the attempt of an increasingly distrusted elite to impose a way of life foreign to the traditions and outlook of millions of people in Europe.
Most analysts fail to grasp the depth of this cultural tension that has created a demand for a voice. To be sure, events like the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, and the refugee crisis have created important opportunities for populist mobilization. But quite independent of these events, what has been at work is a growing demand for populist answers to the problems created by mass migration, multiculturalism, and policies such as the celebration of LGBTQ+ ideals that threaten traditional cultural norms.
As the political theorist Margaret Canovan pointed out, unlike so-called social movements, populism does not merely challenge the holder of power but also “elite values.” Therefore, its hostility is also directed at “opinion formers and the media.” Accordingly, the media has a real problem grasping the dynamics of populist politics. This problem is not simply the fault of its shallow analyses. As an institution, the media has become increasingly estranged from working peoples’ lives and is intensely suspicious of those who do not share its cultural outlook.
Europe’s political establishment regards populism as an existential threat, and invests heavily in the promotion of anti-populist propaganda. In June 2024 the European Commission’s ethics group issued a statement titled “Resisting authoritarian populism.” Among its many recommendations, it argues that identities linked to “territory, nation, ethnicity or religion” should be challenged by “pluralistic” federalist ones.
The mainstream political parties in the European Parliament echo this outlook and have sought to impose a cordon sanitaire in order to quarantine populist parties. But populist movements continue to gain strength, and it is only a matter of time before they will gain institutional influence.
At present, populism constitutes a reaction to a world not of its own making. As Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy government has discovered, populism’s room for maneuver is constrained by financial and economic pressures that limit its ability to uphold the national interest. The challenge facing populist movements is to develop programmatic clarity on how to harness the idealism of its supporters towards the realization of policies that meet the demand for national and popular sovereignty in a world in which globalist institutions hold sway.
In order to advance their goals, populists need to elaborate an economic program that harnesses the market in the interest of the nation. They also need to construct media platforms that can advocate for populist policies on cultural, economic, and social matters. Along with these efforts, populists will need to enhance their influence over institutions of education and culture. Nothing less than a self-consciously cultivated counter-cultural movement can ensure that the impressive gains of 2024 are not squandered.
Last week Tom informed me that the fight is far from over and that the farmers will be back on the streets of Brussels in early 2025. Watch this space.