Ny rapport fra den svenske tænketank Timbro
Never before have populist parties had as strong support throughout Europe as they do today. On average a fifth of all European voters now vote for a left-wing or right-wing populist party. The voter demand for populism has increased steadily since the millennium shift all across Europe. No single country is clearly going against the stream. 2015 was the most successful year so far for populist parties and consistent polls show that right-wing populist parties have grown significantly as a result of the 2015 refugee crisis.
So far this year left-wing or right-wing populist parties have been successful in parliamentary elections in Slovakia, Ireland, Serbia, and Cyprus, in a presidential election in Austria and in regional elections in Germany. A growing number of populist parties are also succeeding in translating voter demand into political influence.
Today, populist parties are represented in the governments of nine European countries and act as parliamentary support in another two. Hence, one third of the governments of Europe are constituted by or dependent on populist parties. It is of course impossible to know whether we are in the beginning, the end or in the middle of this exceptional wave of success for populist parties.
What we can say is that, taken together, this wave constitutes the biggest change in the European political landscape at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the West European party systems it is the biggest change since the breakthrough of democracy. It is hard to overestimate the significance of this challenge for the political elites. This development is by no means unknown.
The breakthrough of the populist parties among voters has been accompanied by extensive coverage in both media and academia. The emergence of these parties has been carefully plotted by both academics and journalists. In Sweden, more than 20 books have been published about the Sweden Democrats in a seven year period, while other parties have only generated a handful collectively.
Populist parties are covered systematically by journalists and European media outlets report almost daily on populist successes with the result that Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Viktor Orbán are among the most well know politicians of our time. Stretching back at least fifteen years there is also a large body of academic writing on the populist parties, many times larger than the literature on any other group of parties.
This has significantly increased our knowledge about the rise of populism and the demography of its voters. We now have a relatively clear picture of who votes for these parties and why. So why another report? Timbro’s Authoritarian Populism Index has been created to shed further light on populism in three ways:
