Frank Furedi
While watching farmers protest in Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Germany during the early months of 2024, I was reminded of Wordsworth’s words: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” Tom, a Flemish farmer who drove his tractor to Brussels in February to protest against proposed environmental laws, told me that the media tried to scare off the public from supporting his cause by calling his movement far right and populist. He smiled and said, “They call me a populist—fine, I’ll take that!”
Tom has never been interested in politics, but like hundreds of thousands of people, he decided that he wanted his voice to be heard. In the course of 2024, populism demonstrated that it had a formidable staying power. In the European Union, populist parties put the political establishment on the defensive. In the United States, it was the sprawling MAGA movement and not the old Republican establishment that bore responsibility for the victory of Donald Trump.
Yet the populist moment of 2024 was a long time coming. Its influence has been growing in Europe since the turn of the century. According to a 2022 study conducted by more than 100 political scientists for the security firm Solace Global, around 32 percent of Europeans had voted for anti-establishment parties. This was a significant increase from 20 percent in the early 2000s and 12 percent in the early 1990s. Since the publication of this study, the influence of populism has continued to expand, leading to its impressive surge this year.
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