A new study reveals the biggest political shift of our lifetime: and elites refuse to see it.
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Britain’s ruling class breathed a collective sigh of relief after Reform UK failed to win the recent by-election in Makerfield.
Already, after Andy Burnham’s triumph, countless columnists and activists have claimed Reform has ‘reached its ceiling’, and its populist revolt has stalled.
But has it?
Or is the ruling class making the same mistake it’s made repeatedly over the last fifteen years: confusing one election result with the broader direction of history?
Step back from Britain for a moment and look at the wider trend that is sweeping through democracies across Europe.
This week, one of the largest ever studies, conducted by more than 150 political scientists across 31 countries, revealed what’s really going on.
It found that, today, almost one in four voters in Europe are planning to vote for national populist parties, like Reform.
One in every four.
That’s up five-fold since the 1990s, revealing how, like a tide that’s slowly inching up the beach, this revolt is only getting stronger and stronger over time.
National populism, the study makes clear, is not just a passing protest, or a temporary blip on the political radar.
It’s now become one of the dominant political traditions of the twenty-first century. And it’s done so precisely because the post-1945 ‘liberal consensus’ in the West is now failing so badly.
Liberals and their more radical progressive cousins essentially made two mistakes.
First, economically, from the 1990s they ushered in ruthless model of globalisation that left millions of workers behind, decimated local communities, and prioritised the interests of urban liberal elites and global corporations over the interests of their national citizens and nation-states. They lost sight, in other words, of the fact there is more to nations than financial markets and GDP.
Second, socially, liberals also worked overtime to dismantle the traditional guardrails of family, community, and country. They flooded Western nations with mass immigration and subjected them to porous borders while reshaping public institutions around anti-Western ideologies. In our schools, universities, government departments, and more, these ideologues launched a full-blown assault on all the things that have upheld Western civilisation for generations —science, biology, truth, reason, free speech, national belonging, and national pride.
Understandably, these failures have pushed millions of people to the entirely logical conclusion that their leaders have not only lost control of migration, borders, and crime, but are no longer even interested in preserving their nations. Even worse: many elites in the West now appear actively invested in destroying their nations.
This is why, as that new study makes clear, more and more people are joining the populist revolt as a vehicle for preventing the erasure of their civilisation.
Just look around Europe today. In France, Jordan Bardella, of National Rally, is now the firm favourite to replace Emmanuel Macron as President of France next year.
A decade ago, his party, led by Marine Le Pen, held two seats in the National Assembly. Today, it holds 123.
In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD, has likewise been transformed. From zero seats ten years ago to 150 seats in the Bundestag today, making it the second-largest national party.
Along the way, as in other countries, the rise of the AfD has completely reshaped Germany’s debate over immigration, borders and identity.
Even parties that have erected a so-called ‘firewall’ to try and isolate the AfD have adopted tougher positions on migration.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni did something many commentators insisted could never happen: she moved from being dismissed as an ‘extremist’ to becoming a durable governing prime minister whose emphasis on borders, sovereignty and nationalism has influenced debates well beyond Italy.
In Austria, the Freedom Party continues to command remarkable levels of support while openly calling for the ‘remigration’ of foreign nationals. It finished first at the most recent national election, was then blocked from power, and is now polling nearly 40 per cent.
Portugal’s Chega has also transformed itself from a fringe movement into a major force in national politics, finishing second at the latest national elections.
Across Scandinavia, national populists have entered government or pushed governing parties towards tougher positions on immigration, while in the Netherlands and Poland they have led governments or been included in governing coalitions.
Even where they are not winning outright, national populists are increasingly setting the terms of debate.
At the European Union level, national populists just helped to push through a new deportations bill that promises to remove rejected asylum seekers, detain them for up to 24 months, send their biometric data to home countries, and allow EU states to set up deportation hubs outside Europe.
Viktor Orbán recently lost power in Hungary but both the country’s political class and people remain firmly opposed to the social liberalism that has been imposed on other European Union member states.
Nigel Farage and Reform lost the recent by-election in Makerfield but continue to set the weather on the small boats, mass immigration, two-tier policing, and more.
And with major elections approaching in France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and possibly also the UK, given what we see in the opinion polls further gains for national populists appear very likely during the next 12-18 months.
This is the real story that is unfolding in Western politics. While the establishment still interprets every election through the old ‘left-versus-right’ framework, today’s dividing line — amidst the ongoing realignment of Western politics — increasingly runs elsewhere.
It’s between those who remain committed to the liberal-globalist project — open borders, supranational governance, multiculturalism, and post-national identity — and those who believe the nation-state, sovereignty, and national cohesion must once again become the main organising principles of Western politics.
Those who are voting for national populists, as another recent study by Pew Research Centre makes clear, are not irrational bigots who do not know what they want. On the contrary, they have concluded, often for good reason, that elected officials in the West no longer care what people think, their children will be worse off than they are, it would be better if Western nations preserved their traditions and ways of life, and that ancestry and deep roots remain an important marker of their national identity.
None of these views are unreasonable, or lie beyond the pale. They point to how nation-states have functioned for centuries and are shared widely, by millions of people.
That does not mean every national populist party will win every election. Because they will not. But if you step back and look at the bigger picture then it is clear that the deeper currents that are driving national populists forward will not disappear.
If anything, as the liberal consensus continues to fail, these currents will only intensify as the realignment rumbles on. Mass migration remains historically high. Europe’s fertility crisis continues to deepen. Housing shortages are chronic. Artificial Intelligence will further disrupt the economy. Trust in the old politics is continuing to collapse. Political elites refuse to even acknowledge the looming threat from Islamism. And living standards continue to decline.
All this means that while the ruling class continue to obsess over individual election results, like those in Makerfield, they downplay if not ignore the much wider challenge to their power and project that is now rapidly coming down the track …
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Reform has a mountain to climb in order to cancel out the onslaught from the establishment which is desperate to keep controlling the narrative and ‘nudging’ people to hold the ‘right’ opinions as you stated Matt, in your last piece. Labour has already enacted many authoritarian bills in attempts to control speech and thought. The latest is to put a lid on citizen journalism by controlling what we can read online. What they want are compliant sheep who haven’t got a clue what’s happening.
We need a much more robust fight back from the right and as we get nearer to an election, we need some rallying slogans such as were used in the Brexit debate. They wrote us off then. We can do it again but it’s going to be hard because they’ve got wise to it and are already using smears and abuse in order to tarnish the right. We have to ensure that those tactics are ridiculed in the same way as Project Fear was. For example, the Nazis advised calling people racist or fascist in order to shut down debate- sound familiar? They were masters of DARVO and so is the establishment.
All true, Matt, the general public do want this pushback against the elite, ruling class, but we are up against very powerful and dark forces behind these elite ‘leaders’. The money men, the people who really run the western nations, the WEF, BlackRock, Soros, Gates et al. I hope you don’t underestimate how much power they weild.