How populism emerged as an electoral force in Europe

Now 72, there is not much in politics he has not seen. “Populism of a kind,” he said, “has existed for as long as there have been politicians. It wins elections. But there’s populism and populism. And some of the ‘pure populism’ we see now ... it didn’t exist here even 10 years ago.”

At the turn of the century, populism was a blip on the horizon of European politics. Since then, the number of Europeans voting for populist parties in national votes has surged from 7% to more than 25%, according to groundbreaking research by the Guardian. Back in 1998, only two small European countries – Switzerland and Slovakia – had populists in government. Two decades later, another nine countries do.

The number of Europeans ruled by a government with at least one populist in cabinet has increased from 12.5 million to 170 million. This has been blamed on everything from recession to migration, social media to globalisation.

But the Czech experience shows it can be more complicated than that. Only 2.3% of the country’s workforce is out of a job, the lowest rate in the EU. Last year, its economy grew by 4.3%, well above the bloc’s average, and the country was untouched by the 2015 European refugee crisis. But in last year’s general election populist parties won just over 40%, a tenfold increase from 1998.

The Czech Republic demonstrates that the factors behind populism’s surge are both far more complex and infinitely more varied than first thought, and that a voter’s decision to cast their ballot for a populist party is just as often a reflection of psychological state as of circumstances and identity.

The Alps

Postwar populists found an early toehold in Europe in Alpine countries with long histories of nationalist or far-right tendencies. The exclusionist, small-government Swiss People’s party (SVP), rooted in “authentic” rural resistance to urban and foreign influence, led a referendum defeat of Switzerland’s bid to join the EEA in 1992, and has swayed national policy since.

The Swiss party practically invented rightwing populism’s “winning formula”: nationalist demands on immigration, hostility towards neoliberalism and a fierce focus on preserving national traditions and sovereignty. It helps of course that Switzerland is also a magnet for the “international elite”, symbolised by Davos, banking secrecy and a spray of UN headquarters.

In neighbouring Austria, the Freedom party, a far more straightforward far-right movement founded by a former Nazi in 1956, won more than 20% of the vote for the first time in 1994 and is now in government, as junior coalition partner, for the fourth time.

Italy, another country with a history of radical rightwing politics, voted four times for the populist Silvio Berlusconi. But for the rest of the 1990s, the tendency remained confined to this central troika, each with their own political peculiarities.

The tide started to turn with the turn of the century. The political landscape in the Netherlands was shaken up in 2002 with the rapid rise of the populist Pim Fortuyn, and then by his assassination. That same year, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right Front National rocked France by reaching a presidential runoff vote. Twice in 2005, referendums in France and the Netherlands rejected a draft EU constitution, seen at the time as victories for the “ordinary people” against the European elite.

The south

In 2008 came the financial crisis and recession. As many people, particularly in southern Europe, saw living standards shrink, the centrist parties that had governed hitherto – and the Eurocrats in Brussels with their clipboard austerity – became an obvious target.

Hit hardest of all by the crisis, the Greeks gave 27% of their votes to the radical leftwing populists of Syriza in 2012, electing them to government three years later with a score nearly 10 points higher. In Spain, the anti-austerity Podemos took 21% in 2015 just a year after the party was founded.

In Italy, decades of corruption, mismanagement and the impact of the 2015 refugee crisis resulted in the anti-establishment, tax-and-spend Five Star Movement sweeping to power last year in an unlikely coalition with the far-right, anti-immigration League.

The west

More recently, western Europe’s solid inner circle has started to succumb to the populist wave. In Germany, the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – founded in direct response to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s assertion at the height of the financial crisis that there was “no alternative” to the EU bailing out Greece – has 92 seats in the Bundestag.

Le Pen’s daughter Marine made the second round of France’s presidential elections in 2017. Perhaps as remarkable as that, her first-round score was little higher than that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the surging populist leftwing group La France Insoumise. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Freedom party (PVV) has risen to become the second-largest parliamentary force.

The east

The biggest advances have been made in central and eastern Europe. All four so-called Visegrád countries are governed by populist parties including Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary – where populist parties secured 63% of the vote in this year’s elections – and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice in Poland.

Both parties only started showing their true colours – populist, culturally conservative, authoritarian – after they were first elected. They are now attacking core liberal institutions such as the independent judiciary and free press, increasingly defining national identities in terms of ethnicity and religion and demonising opponents, such as the Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros, in language reminiscent of the 1930s.

The north

Even in famously liberal Scandinavia, nation-first, anti-immigration populists have found their voice over the past decade. The far-right Sweden Democrats, a party with origins in the neo-Nazi movement, secured just 0.4% of the vote in 1998, but in the most recent election achieved a record high of 17.6%. The Danish People’s party has been propping up a minority centre-right government since 2015.

Mainstream Nordic parties have long resisted forming coalition governments with rightwing populists, but have been forced to give ground in Norway, where the Progress party has been in government coalitions since 2013, and Finland, where the small Blue Reform party – an offshoot of the populist Finns – is also in coalition.

Across Europe, rightwing populist parties have also succeeded in influencing policy even when they are not in government, with parties such as Britain’s Ukip, the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s party, the PVV and the AfD dragging the discourse of their countries’ dominant centre-right parties to the right on subjects such as immigration.

Populist progress has been accompanied almost everywhere by a profound redrawing of Europe’s postwar political landscape and a continuing fragmentation of national votes. As the big mainstream parties of government have shrunk, the smaller parties – some of them populist but by no means all – have been getting steadily bigger.

Although this process has affected both the centre-right and centre-left, it is Europe’s traditional social democratic parties that have been hardest hit, haemorrhaging votes to the radical right and left. It is a trend that looks hard to turn around: Germany’s once-mighty SPD is languishing at 14% in the polls, the French Socialist party scored just 7.4% in last year’s parliamentary elections, and also last year the Dutch Labour party won just 5.7%.

Kavan’s Czech Social Democrats have fared little better. As recently as 2006, the centre-left party was winning nearly a third of the national vote; its score last year was 7.3% and it returned just 15 MPs, down from 50 in 2013. Instead, nearly a third of Czech voters cast their ballots for the six-year-old Ano party.

Ano means “Yes” in Czech, but is also an acronym for for Akce nespokojených občanů, or Action of Dissatisfied Citizens. The party was founded and is still led by Andrej Babiš, the Czech Republic’s second-wealthiest citizen, worth an estimated £2.7bn, who owns two of the country’s biggest newspapers and was finance minister in the previous coalition government.

So what persuaded Czech voters to become a part of Europe’s populist surge? Underscoring populism’s many national nuances and variations, Babiš – despite facing damaging corruption allegations – presents as a successful outsider, a businessman who can get things done in the way that career politicians cannot.

The Babiš pitch, said Vlastimil Havlík, a political scientist from Masaryk University in Brno, is that he has built “a big, highly successful corporation; that he is a businessman untainted by a long career in politics; and that he can simply run the place better – make people better off – than the corrupt, cack-handed politicians”.

Adding to the populist appeal, Babiš is a good communicator and has no apparent ideology beyond national efficiency – and maintaining his own popularity. “He doesn’t have to be the best manager, just perceived as better than his rivals,” said Havlík.

“First it was all: ‘These guys are thieves, they’ve stolen the country from you,’” said Ondřej Kolář, the young centre-right mayor of Prague’s sixth district. “Now it’s: ‘You can trust me, I will take care of your problems.’ And because the economy is doing well, he can afford pay rises for teachers, and public transport discounts for pensioners.”

Czechs also gave 10.6% of their votes to the unapologetically opportunist Freedom and Direct Democracy party, which campaigned entirely on an anti-immigration platform. And this year, the nation narrowly re-elected as its president Miloš Zeman, a former Social Democrat prime minister who in 2013 returned to politics after a decade away – allowing him, too, to position himself as an “outsider”. Zeman has made no effort to hide his connections to Russia, and seems to revel in shocking with defiant and outspoken anti-Islam, anti-­refugee, racist and xenophobic rhetoric.

But the Czech Republic is a long way from becoming another Hungary or Poland, whose populist leaders are ramping up their efforts to turn courts into extensions of the executive and public radio stations into state propaganda outlets.

These two countries represent a grim warning of what can happen when nationalist populists of a certain ilk come to power. For the time being, though, back in Prague, Kavan remains optimistic. “It’s true that a measure of populism wins elections,” he said.

“But if these pure populists don’t combine it with something else, something real … Look, it’s simply not enough just to offer people a feeling that you are on their side. In the long term, you know, you have to offer real solutions.”

Jon Henley