Matt Goodwin is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and shares his research at mattgoodwin.org.
The British Conservatives look set to lose power at exactly the same time as many other right-wing political parties and national populist movements enjoy some of their best results to date.
That’s one conclusion you’d draw were you to take a look at the latest election results and opinion polls across much of Europe and beyond. Another conclusion is that the national populist revolt which initially found its expression here through the UK Independence Party and then the Brexit Party looks set to return via the insurgent Reform UK party, which in recent weeks hit a new high of 13 per cent in a national opinion poll, largely thanks to support from one in four Brexit voters and one in four 2019 Conservative Party voters.
Look around the political landscape. In the Netherlands, most recently, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom enjoyed their best evet results, topping the polls with almost 24 per cent of the vote. In Germany —where academics once cheered on the ‘Green surge’ and proclaimed populism was over— the Greens have flopped, while the Alternative for Germany is second in the polls.
In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats have just enjoyed their best ever result, polling over 20 per cent, and are now effectively running the government through a confidence and supply agreement. In Finland, the Finns Party similarly just enjoyed a new high, polling at 20 per cent before joining a ruling coalition government.
In France, Marine Le Pen now leads the second largest party in the National Assembly, is leading the polls ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections and could, quite plausibly, become the next President of France in 2027—especially if the onslaught from Islamist terror and mass immigration continues.
In Austria, the Freedom Party has now fully recovered from a damaging scandal and back as a leading force in national polls. In Spain, support for Vox declined slightly at the latest election but the party is still, remarkably, present in eighteen of Spain’s nineteen regional parliaments and is now helping to run five of them.
In Portugal, where there’s an election next year, Chega is now polling third nationally, significantly up on its result at the last election. Italy, meanwhile, remains firmly in the hands of Georgia Meloni, whose party continues to dominate the polls while, in Hungary ,Viktor Orbán is still comfortably dominating the country.
And across the European Union as a whole, where some 400 million voters will elect a new European Parliament next year, the very latest polls point to big gains for the national populist ‘Identity and Democracy’ group, forecast to jump from the fifth to the third largest group in the parliament, alongside gains for the European Conservatives and Reformists.
What’s going on? Many on the left will tell you the resurgence of national populism is just another symptom of the post-Covid financial crisis, with inflation driving an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis and undermining living standards.
And they have a point. If you look at all elections held around the world since inflation peaked then the general story, from France to Sweden, from Argentina to Italy, is one of incumbent governments being seriously punished by voters, either finding themselves kicked out of office or their political power dramatically weakened.
But on a deeper level, what we are witnessing is the continuation of what I argued in my book, National Populism, which was published in 2018 and co-authored with Roger Eatwell.
These movements are once again on the rise, in short, because of how four, deep-rooted currents in Western democracies are carving out considerable space for movements which seek to prioritise the interests, the culture, the values, and the ways of life of the majority group against what they see as self-interested, corrupt, narcissistic, and incompetent elites.
The first, distrust, concerns how voters no longer trust their established political institutions and the expert class which have had a terrible few decades —from failing to see the post-2008 global financial crisis coming, to failing to secure our borders, from failing to avoid disastrous foreign wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, to failing to drive economic growth.
This distrust has not only been fuelled by the dire performance of our ruling class; it’s also flowed from how our institutions have become closed-off to people who do not belong to the university-educated, urban, and far more socially liberal middle-class.
These feelings of distrust are also exacerbated by people’s parallel fears about the actual or perceived destruction of their national community, identity, and ways of life —whether due to mass immigration, illegal migration, collapsing birth rates among the majority group, or the rise of woke elites who derive their sense of social status from other elites by downplaying, if not repudiating, their national identity, history, and values.
These fears about the loss of the national community are also being stoked by parallel concerns about relative deprivation —namely, a worry held by millions of people that the majority group is now being left behind relative to racial, sexual, and gender minorities or, worse, is being pushed down a new moral hierarchy in society, no longer considered as morally worthy as these other groups in society.
This sense of relative deprivation is not just about economics; it’s also rooted in a profound worry that, compared to high-status, sacred and ‘victimised’ minority groups and their morally righteous white liberal graduate ‘allies’, other groups in the West – mainly, the white working-class, non-graduates, older voters, and indeed white majorities — are being overlooked, if not held in contempt, as morally inferior, ‘low-status’ oppressors.
And running beneath all this is the continuation of a new era of political dealignment, a new chapter in the history of mass democracy in which the old bonds between the masses and the elites which once held politics in place are now rapidly breaking down, making politics on both the left and right more chaotic, volatile, and unpredictable, which, in turn, is making it much easier for new parties to breakthrough.
Ultimately, it’s because of these four, deep-rooted, and much longer-running currents that national populism is continuing to appeal to rising numbers of voters who are utterly fed-up with what many of them see as a broken status-quo. And much of this also helps to explain why, in Britain, Reform UK is now cutting through here, too.
I’ve just undertaken the largest and most comprehensive survey of Reform UK voters to date, the results of which I will be sharing in this column during the coming weeks. But much of it confirms the general picture that is unfolding across much of Europe – a growing army of often working-class, elderly, and male voters who, usually outside London, are hacked off with both legal and illegal migration, are very distrustful of the legacy institutions – not just the big parties but also the BBC, the creative industries, and the university class, and now feel that their wider group is being pushed aside to make room for immigrants.
And this also helps to explain why, in my view at least, Reform UK has not yet fulfilled its electoral potential. One question I asked British voters in this poll was whether they would ever consider voting for Reform UK. While the party is currently averaging about 11 per cent in the polls, my polling suggests they could soon reach at least 16 per cent, especially if they continue to tap into the same four currents that are fuelling national populists across much of Europe. And that would be more than enough to not just bury Rishi Sunak’s hopes at the next election but also, potentially, set the stage for something even bigger to follow.