After Trump, populists look to Germany

On the rise of national populism and increasingly frantic efforts to stop it

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They did everything they could to stop him. They called him a fascist. They tied him up in legal case after legal case. They wrote him off in legacy media and polls. They even tried to kill him. And yet, still, despite all that, Donald Trump just kept on coming, taking complete control of Congress and the White House.

There’s a lesson in all this. Nearly a decade on from the earthquake of 2016, the liberal elite class, the people who control the most important institutions in our societies, have completely failed to find a serious and convincing response to the continuing rise of national populism.

As I wrote last week, as the sheer scale of Trump’s victory became clear so too did the unavoidable fact that the elite class looks completely lost. Like an elderly relative being shown the latest technological device at Christmas, the people who rule over us look confused, bewildered, old fashioned, and hopelessly out-of-touch with what is now swirling around them.

As big tech investor and early Trump supporter Peter Thiel remarked in a podcast with Bari Weiss this week, had Trump lost the 2024 election then people would now be saying that 2016 was the fluke outlier. But because Trump won, and won so convincingly, the 2020 election will now come to be seen as the outlier —an outlier in a new Trumpian cultural zeitgeist that began on that escalator in 2015 and will last until at least 2029, if not longer through his relatives and successors.

And the one constant that has run through all this, as Thiel and Weiss note, is that what we call “the culture” —celebrities, writers, thinkers, politicians, Hollywood, and so on—has never looked so out-of-touch. Has there ever been a time when the views of the celebrity class and cultural elites have been so insignificant?

But this is not just about America. You see this, too, in Europe, where despite similar protests and shenanigans from the elite class Trump-style national populists have continued to reach new heights.

While they are each a little different from the next, the continuing rise of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, the Sweden Democrats, the Freedom Party of Austria, and Nigel Farage and Reform all reflect an elite class that either has no interest in replying to their voters, does not know what to say, or does not want to talk to them at all.

And now, over the next four months, we’re about to see Europe’s elite struggle to contain a particularly important populist revolt in yet another large and powerful country —Germany.

With a fresh set of national elections just announced, and coming fast down the track in February, here’s why I think the German elite is about to be rocked by its own Trump-style revolt and one that will have far-reaching consequences.