Twilight of the Populists?

Perhaps it's possible that, despite it all, we have reached peak populism

The billionaire leader, a huge fan of Brexit and with a team of suited yes-men surrounding him, had sidelined the corrupt, monied elites who had long controlled the system. He was a new broom, who had come to brush the halls clean. A decade of failure would be turned around. Old glories would be restored.

There would, alas, need to be sacrifices. Staff would be let go. Perks and benefits removed. Sentimental ties with old friends cut. There would need to be a refresh of leadership too. And if the new guys were no good then they would have to be placed on the scrapheap too. No time to waste. This was accelerationism. What could go wrong?

…

But enough about Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his flailing takeover of Manchester United.

…

I suspect you saw that coming. I didn’t really hide the analogy that well. Perhaps a little tortured. Forgive me.

But what I want to do in this piece is to suggest something a little provocative. Possibly also wrong. My predictions, as regular readers will know, are not always on base. Still, it feels to me that we may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism.

Great moments of long-heralded and sweeping change led by a strongman figure can often fall apart into farce within weeks, as Manchester United fans will attest. And just as many of the rest of us have taken great pleasure in the binfire that is Manchester United’s 2024/25 season, there may yet be some small joys to come amidst the utter chaos in global politics now.

March 2025 might seem a bold moment to pronounce the twilight of populism. I’m not sure I fully agree yet with my hunch on this. But something feels like it’s shifting - certainly in the UK and Europe, perhaps also too in America, the current feasting ground of victorious populists. So think of this as one possible scenario. Of how things might yet play out.

If we have indeed reached peak populism, the first thing one must say is that the peak is pretty high. Donald Trump’s second term has been even more populist than the last - he is now unleashed and openly desiccating the ‘deep state’. Populist parties of the right are the largest single block in the European Parliament. In Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Austria, populist parties have won a plurality of seats in recent elections, if not always the right to govern. In France and Germany they have become the official opposition. In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have led in several recent voting intention polls.

It is of course possible that the real ‘peak’ is even higher, that we are at what mountaineers call a ‘false summit’. But given the list above, I don’t think it is insane to expect some natural regression to the mean, or even a more meaningful and sustained decline. My hunch is less bold than it might first appear just on that basis.

But beyond the standard pendulum of politics, where political gravity inevitably tugs at the surging populists, I think there is something deeper.

Styles of Populism

Bluntly, there are two types of ‘populists’. There are those who win on populism but govern much like mainstream leaders. Here the most obvious example is Georgia Meloni but arguably Giuseppe Conte and post-2019 Boris Johnson resemble this.¹ And then there are those who try to govern as populists.

With this latter group, the need to continually find elite enemies when you are now the elite leads in two directions. One is authoritarianism, as with Viktor Orbàn and Recip Tayyip Erdoğan. The other is chaos as in Trump term one. Trump’s second term appears to be combining both in what can only be called chaotic authoritarianism.

Chaotic authoritarianism is an acquired taste. Usually the only person who acquires the taste is the leader themselves. For everyone else around them, including their allies, it presents insurmountable challenges. It’s worth thinking briefly about actual authoritarian regimes to see how this plays out.

Stable authoritarianism usually requires a mix of co-opting your potential rivals while buying off discontent with public funding or alternatively spending your resources on directly repressing that discontent. For this to work, for you to be able to balance threats from both your side - elites - and below - the masses. Milan Svolik, the Yale political scientist, terms these the ‘problem of authoritarian power-sharing’ and the ‘problem of authoritarian control’.

They do this by creating both institutions - politburos and the like - that produce stable expectations for potential rivals - how to acquire resources and power of one’s own, how succession might work. For the masses again you control them through setting clear expectations - join the regime-sanctioned party, criticise local officials but not the guy in charge, etc. Long-lasting stable authoritarian regimes, such as the People’s Republic of China (at least since Mao), have extraordinarily complex institutional arrangements to tamp down on volatility.

But what if your leader personifies volatility? Acts as the anointed voice of the public? Wants to keep rivals and the electorate permanently on their toes? Then we have chaotic authoritarianism and trust in the regime breaks down, even among fellow authoritarians. Sometimes regimes respond by further deepening their power - becoming ever more arbitrary and ruthless in crushing dissent. And producing policy disasters, as in the famines under Stalin and Mao, or the Terror of a Robespierre or Pol Pot. Once stability breaks apart so do the incentives to invest, obey, or even work at all. It is the difference I noted a few posts ago between being governed by a ‘stationary bandit’ and a ‘roving bandit’, to use the language of Mancur Olsen.

Let’s reel it in a bit because we have entered a discussion of actually authoritarian regimes as opposed to populist democracies that are toying with authoritarianism, our current object of study. How does this translate?

Well, democracies can always be chaotic rather than stable. That’s a basic consequence of Arrow’s Theorem - that in the absence of strong rules and strictures, free-wheeling democratic choices can wheel freely into chaos. Chaotic populism looks a little like Berlusconi-era Italy - a leader who disrupts existing dimensions of politics but is also unable to accomplish much in policy terms, flitting in and out of office on the public’s whims. Business leaders try and surf the chaos with at the least the knowledge that if a policy is disliked enough, wait a few months and it will be changed. Perhaps Trump 1.0 or Britain between 2017 and 2019 bore some resemblance to this.

Democracies can also adopt a non-chaotic populism with an authoritarian streak as elected but illiberal leaders slowly and methodically remove constraints on their executive power and build up bases of favoured clients in business and the media. This is the Orbàn agenda. The consequence is a stable financial environment for other elites to enrich themselves, on your terms, and a controlled media environment to repress alternative voices.

Trump’s Chaotic Authoritarianism

Trump 2.0 is trying to mix the two. His populism is both chaotic and authoritarian. In my interview of him for Rethink, Henry Farrell noted that Trump was in D&D language, chaotic evil. Sadly we cut this because it was both provocative and nerdy. But you know, pretty incisive tbh.

In any case, the shine, such as it was, of Trump’s first few weeks has emphatically worn off and in both foreign policy and economic outcomes, the picture has turned very dark.

In terms of foreign policy the mixture of chaos and authoritarianism has been pronounced. Trump’s ‘deal’ to end the Ukraine War is constantly undermined by his constant back and forths - including combining inviting Zelenskyy to the White House to sign a fairly extortionate minerals deal, while simultaneously setting up the meeting to shout at Zelenskyy and thereby ruin any chance of the deal.

With European allies there has been aggressive inconsistency - sending Vance over to scold the Europeans in his tween version of an ‘alpha male’ style, followed by Trump fawning over his invitation to a State dinner in the UK, followed by Vance ‘inadvertently’ insulting British soldiers, followed by maybe agreeing again on UK and French peacekeepers, followed by insulting the Polish foreign minister this weekend.

With Russia there has, tragically, been more consistency - a general willingness to follow Putin’s narrative of the conflict, though even here there have been erratic new threats about sanctions.

Closer to home we have had the wild swings over tariffs - the constant threats and made-up reasoning (Canadian ‘fentanyl labs’) with two of America’s closest partners. There has been chaos - witness Howard Lutnick suffering some kind of Dantean hell of going from all-powerful finance CEO to guy who has to convey whatever tariff policy Trump has decided on every five minutes. There is a very funny video (2 mins in) of the conservative TV host Maria Bartiromo basically begging Trump to give some ‘clarity’ to business, which he absolutely refuses to do. And there has also, I should note, been authoritarianism - veiled threats about renegotiating Canadian borders, sending troops into Mexico to fight cartels, demeaning each and every negotiating party.

And then there has been the domestic economy. DOGE exemplifies chaotic authoritarianism. There is no clarity legally about who runs DOGE - it is very obviously Elon Musk, except in the government’s legal arguments, where it is not. DOGE agents have been asking US Marshalls to help them force their way into small government agencies, which then have staff arbitrarily fired and programs cut, oftentimes again without any clear legal ability to do so. The CDC is not able to publicise info about the measles outbreaks currently ongoing; the Social Security Administration may or may not be able to send out cheques properly in a few months time; tens of thousands of Fulbright scholars have had their payments stopped, leaving them stranded in foreign countries. It is wild. It is callous. And it is arbitrary.

And people are noticing. Business leaders are clearly starting to panic even if few of them are willing to talk openly to the press because of fear of arbitrary (and again, illegal) punishment. A number of large corporations directly affected by tariffs - automakers in particular but also Jack Daniels - have broadcast their concerns and in part these appear to have motivated the U-turn on tariffs for goods that meet USMCA criteria (USMCA is Trump’s own NAFTA replacement that typically he has decided he now doesn’t like).

Most importantly there are increasingly signs that the erratic authoritarianism of the tariffs and DOGE is feeding into the real economy. The jobs report last Thursday missed expectations, though not by a huge amount. However, it doesn’t include the bulk of the job cuts issues by DOGE which hit in the middle and later part of February. Inflation expectations are up and consumer confidence down. Trump’s Treasury and Commerce secretaries Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick have started to claim that any inflation caused by tariffs is not proper inflation because it is simply a change in relative costs. To which I say, good luck guys with that argument.

And now Donald Trump himself is being asked questions about whether the country is going into a recession. This is the guy who was going to fix the economy ‘from day one’ and now he is umming and erring about an economic downturn. He issued a post this weekend asking the public to give him til September to start turning things around. And in a shock statement that upends my understanding of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ he claimed that Americans were being too short-termist: "There could be a little disruption. Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a 100 year perspective. We go by quarters. And you can't go by that.” Good news stock-pickers! Wait a hundred years and you’ll reap the returns. You can join Jacob Rees-Mogg in line…

Now look, none of this means the Trump Presidency and Republican trifecta aren’t still in place. Trump is historically very unpopular (the least popular president at this point in their term other than himself in his last term, and the lowest ever economic evaluation). But that doesn’t matter in policy terms right now. Because of polarisation he can’t sink that low. And many Americans’ views of the economy will be filtered by their partisan beliefs regardless of what’s happening ‘out there’. And maybe the economy will improve. Maybe.

Will Trump be hurt by all this in the 2026 midterms? Probably. He was in 2018 and things are going south much faster this time. It could very well be like George W Bush’s second term where the only way was down and he went down fast. Yes, there are real concerns about free and fair elections in a couple of years time but I am not hugely worried about this, given such elections are controlled at the state and local level. Perhaps I should be more worried but for now I’m not.

How American Populism Hurts Populists Elsewhere

But what’s going on in American public opinion isn’t the real story about peak populism. It’s its effects on politics elsewhere.

Let’s start in America’s near neighbourhood. The effect of Trump’s trade war on Canada and series of petty insults (Governor Trudeau, 51st State etc) is to have completely screwed up wannabe populist Pierre Poilievre’s glide path to becoming the next Canadian Prime Minister. Poilievre’s Conservatives were twenty points ahead of the governing Liberals in polling until the last month. Now the Liberals have drawn ahead. And that’s before the unpopular Justin Trudeau is replaced by Mark Carney. Trudeau has stood up quite effectively against Trump but really the politics are easy.

Every Canadian party and politician is furious with Trump. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford (brother of the famous and sadly deceased crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob) has been in front of every available camera talking about stopping Canadian supplies of nickel and now electricity to America and cancelling Ontario’s contract with Starlink. To give you a sense of how dumb it is to get into a battle with Doug Ford, this is a guy who picked a fight with Margaret Attwood over library funding. He does not care. He is the honey badger of populist politicians.

Now Poilievre himself is out with a pretty angry message too, telling Trump to ‘knock it off’. That said, the Conservatives have been caught on the back foot by this and arguably the Liberals are now favourites to retain power in the forthcoming Canadian election.

And then there’s the UK. Just a month ago I was getting calls every five minutes from British journalists about the possibility of Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister. This has allowed me to keep harping on about my Danelaw strategy for where Reform should target seats: leave Wessex to the Lib Dems, the cities to Labour, and Mercia to the Tories - take Essex, East Anglia, Lincolnshire, South and East Yorkshire and Northumbria. But despite the temptation to play out pre-1066 geographic divides, I don’t really believe there was much chance of this, even in the halcyon days of <checks notes> December and January, when Trump had just got re-elected.

Because, as you would anticipate, once Trump actually took office, we had President Trump in all his chaotic authoritarian glory. Along with a Reform UK party who were tied both in personal connections and in the public’s eyes to MAGA. Up until early February the incentives were clearly for Reform-curious people to talk up Trump, Elon and JD Vance. My one-time political science colleague, now - well, whatever he is - Matt Goodwin talked about Vance’s sophomoric speech in Munich as a wonderful opportunity to Make Europe Great Again. Well the latter has happened but not entirely as Matt, with his famed prognosticating powers, expected. I’ll come back to that…

In the UK, the key moment when Nigel Farage’s bet on Trump looked like it might not in fact come through was the ambush of Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office. This cut through worldwide - something about the sheer childlike malevolence of the President and VP, cutting up against the heroism that Europeans associate with Zelenskyy. And of course this has been followed by weeks of equally tone-deaf (from a European perspective but let’s face it more generally) remarks on Ukraine from Trump. At the time of the Oval Office fiasco, Nigel Farage tried to have it both ways - stating that Zelenskyy’s not wearing a suit was ‘rude’ but also not wanting to defend Trump’s behaviour.

But it has just gotten harder and harder for Reform. There was very soon another moment of fratboy diplomacy from Vance, who looks like he is trying to speed-run Spiro Agnew’s reputation. Vance’s infelicitous response to the suggestion that Europeans (meaning Britain and France) could provide peacekeepers was to doubt the merits of a ‘random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years’. That went down well. While the Labour government understandably held their fire, some of their MPs, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats were furious. As was Nigel Farage briefly, though he had approvingly called Vance’s previous Munich speech a ‘political revolution’. Farage has tried to dance through the past two weeks, I think with some success, but it is proving ever more challenging. Reform voters don’t look much like the rest of the electorate in their policy preferences and support for Donald Trump. They still like the guy.

But people more weakly attracted to populism - the bedrock of any support for further shifts in that direction in the UK - they don’t. To give but two examples, over the weekend both Andrew Neil and Jeremy Clarkson came out with excoriating, and in the latter case crude, attacks on Trump and Vance. Along with a lot of, in the beginning we thought he would be OK but actually we misjudged it. A mea culpa! In the British press! Imagine…

For Reform, breaking with Trump is harder than for the right-leaning big beasts of the press. And that means a split in the party is brewing. Reform has just five MPs. Farage, the previous leader Richard Tice, James McMurdock (who has an…um… not entirely savoury backstory), Lee Anderson (once of Labour, then a Conservative, now Reform), and ex-Southampton FC chairman Rupert Lowe.

Lowe may do to Reform what he did to Southampton, which made him a hero in the eyes of Portsmouth fans at least. He has over the weekend been stripped of the whip, accused of bullying. Before that he had issued claims that Reform needed, well, reform to weaken Farage’s control. Lowe, you might recall, was also Elon Musk’s preference when he fell out with Nigel Farage recently. Which means an already tiny party is split and likely to split further.

The tensions over Trumpian populism I suspect will continue to roil an already roil-ready party. They may do well in the local elections but in the long-run the desire of some in the party to move in an ever Trumpward direction will come up against Farage’s desire to be a major player in British politics and I suspect we will look back on the first weeks of 2025 as the high point for potential Prime Minister Nigel Farage.

Finally, we have Europe. A continent beset apparently by populism. And yet… increasingly starting to turn away, I think. The far right Freedom Party in Austria won a plurality of the vote under Herbert Kickl and yet was unable to form a government, leaving the way open for a centrist coalition to take office.

The AfD came second in the German elections but have been completely locked out of government (with the ‘left’-populist BSW also failing to make the Bundestag at all). Instead Germany will be ruled by a Christian Democrat / Social Democrat grand coalition once again, with a leader Friedrich Merz who has already defined himself against Trump and Vance, convinced German politicians - of all people - to loosen public debt rules, and is hoping to lead a European coalition of support for Ukraine. This has led to a surge in European stock markets at the signs of military Keynesianism and hence we now have our moment of Make Europe Great Again, as the DAX surges while the S&P500 craters. There you go Matt. Vance did cause it. In a way, I suppose.

In Romania, the Putin-curious populist candidate for President in the cancelled election of last year, Calin Georgescu, has been banned from running. Everywhere parties in the centre are being more decisive and muscular, even if as in Romania, we might raise an eyebrow about the decision to ban candidates.

Even some of the populists of Europe seem to be shifting. Meloni has been robust in her anti-Putin policy, despite her relative closeness to both Trump and Musk. She has even talked about a NATO-like policy for Ukraine, presuming that full membership is off the table. Marine LePen of all people has been trying to distance herself from Trump and Vance in the wake of Vance’s ‘random country’ line and Trump’s withdrawal of support for Ukraine. Viktor Orbàn must be feeling quite alone.

Lessons for Liberals (and Conservatives and Socialists and Greens…)

For months, but in a way for decades, people have been rooting around for an effective, compelling mainstream strategy to take on populism. Liberals have found this especially hard. Unlike socialists or Greens, liberals lack an underlying policy dream they would love to pursue in a constraint-free world. Unlike conservatives, they have no sympathy with populists nor an existential need not to lose voters to them. And so liberals have tried simply to sound the alarm with claims about ‘democracy on the ballot’, Project Fear-style warnings, and so forth. These have not, you will recall, worked.

But I think something is shifting now. The mainstream is getting another chance, just as it did after World War Two. And like then, it is the common enemy that unites and inspires. That provides a bit of Dutch courage. That enemy is most clearly Vladimir Putin. But we have had Putin for almost quarter century. So it’s not him alone. No, it is the Trump-Putin quasi-alliance that has done the trick. It is the fateful decision of chaotic, populist authoritarianism to sidle up to stable, deep, old-school authoritarianism.

Defeating populism in democracies requires an enemy. But it can’t be the populists themselves. That is their very fuel. Of course, they will say, the elites want to destroy us to protect the corrupt swamp. So populists alone won’t do the trick as an enemy.

Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy though. Well that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy. It becomes harder for populists to deflect, to dissimulate effectively. They become glued to the very thing they usually denounce - an outside, foreign force. And they cannot easily unstick themselves. The old lines lose their impact. The mainstream parties see a weakened populist opposition. And they go in for the kill.

That’s one story. Perhaps not the most likely. But over the past weeks it has become a possible narrative. And if there’s anything that the mainstream parties need, it’s a narrative. With good guys and bad guys.

If the populists are going to make it this easy to attack them, then it’s simply the weakness, the self-doubt, the lack of will to survive that will fail the mainstream. These are great parties with grand traditions. If they can’t do a little bit of aggressive opportunistic politics now… well then there’s no hope for them, or for us.

1. Yes, I know that Meloni and Johnson both engaged in quite a bit of populist policymaking but usually within what I would think of as the parameters of standard conservative thinking - e.g. think Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher.