Europe’s political landscape is undergoing the biggest transformation since the end of the Cold War. Over the past two decades, populist parties have steadily increased their support, entering most national parliaments across the continent. In many countries, they have even taken over the levers of government. An unprecedented populist belt now covers a big and strategically important stretch of Central and Eastern Europe, from the Baltic Sea all the way to the Aegean.
In this report, we describe the key components of this populist surge, and assess how it has allowed populists to transform the continent’s politics: The rise of the populists, we argue, has already changed the social and economic policies pursued by many countries; created new tensions between nation-states within Europe; and begun to put pressure on democratic institutions in a variety of countries that had once been seen as consolidated democracies.
We base our analyses on a novel database that tracks electoral results of 102 populist parties in 39 European countries between 2000 and 2017.1 This allows us to isolate trends across multiple electoral cycles and to compare countries and geographic regions. In short, it provides an empirical foundation to situate the present surge of populist parties within a wider historical and geographic context. It has also allowed us to create a first-of-its-kind time-series map which illustrates the pervasiveness of populists, especially in Eastern Europe, and highlights the rapid increase in populist vote share since the turn of the millennium.
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