A populist year?

April: we start our tour of elections around the world in France
Ipsos | Almanac 2022 | April | Elections

In politics, populism has dominated Europe, America and Latam for years. While overall populist sentiment may not be quite as evident as it was, the underlying forces driving it remain very much with us. Here we survey where the world is now, starting in France.

Ipsos | Almanac | Elections

 

In France, Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Rally, considered by most to be on the far right, came in second place on April 10 during the Presidential run-off with 41.5% of the vote vs. 58.6% for the re-elected President Emmanuel Macron (in 2017, Marine Le Pen obtained 33.0%). And then in June 2022, the National Rally succeeded in getting 89 deputies elected during the general elections (vs. 8 in 2017) while the far-left party (La France Insoumise – The Rebellious France) obtained 84 deputies out of the 149 of the left-wing coalition (vs. 17 in 2017).

In Sweden, the legislative elections on September 11 saw the victory of a coalition of various right-wing parties, including the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) which won 73 seats out of the 176 obtained by the four parties, ahead of the left-wing parties (173 seats).

In Brazil, during the October 30 presidential election, outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro, ranked on the far right of the political spectrum, narrowly lost to left-wing candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as "Lula"), by 50.9% to 49.1%. Bolsonaro thwarted the predictions that he would suffer a crushing defeat because of his management of the Covid-19 pandemic, the replacement of the Bolsa Família social program by Auxílio Brasil, the destruction of the Amazonian Forest and indigenous peoples.

In the United States, even if Donald Trump cannot congratulate himself on the tidal wave he promised for the midterm elections of November 8, the Republicans won the House of Representatives with 218 votes out of 435, with the Democrats keeping their majority in the Senate, by a head, with 50 elected against 49 for the Republicans. Here again, despite the controversial personality of the previous President, his apparent role in the invasion of the Capitol, Donald Trump continues to play a leading role in American political life and has announced his candidacy for the Presidential 2024.

It will also be remembered that in Hungary, Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party has been in power for more than ten years and won the 2022 legislative elections on April 3 with 59% of the seats in parliament where it forms a coalition with the Christian Democratic Party NKDP. In Poland, the ultra-conservative and anti-LGBT Andrzej Duda won re-election in the 2020 presidential elections when the Law and Justice (PiS) party won over 43% of the vote in the Polish Parliament in the 2019 parliamentary elections.

Ipsos | Almanac | Elections | Populism

 

What is “populism”?

With this word, commentators tend to mishmash racism, nationalism, climate change scepticism, anti-capitalism, traditionalism, etc., embodied in a strong leader. But we must distinguish between this “populism on the lookout for scapegoats” and the attraction of a paternalistic right, as we saw in Italy during the legislative elections in September 2022.

Donald Trump had utilized the idea of stigmatizing a “broken system” opposing the "elites" and the "people", the former incompetent and inhuman, the latter holder of truth and common sense. Voters on the far left have often the same feelings but do not designate the same scapegoats; for them, the culprits are not immigrants, but capitalism and the “world of money”, creating and aggravating inequalities between the healthiest and the poorest people.

The common point of all the so-called populist parties is to position themselves against “enemies”

Societal transformations embody another kind of enemy, morally and religiously, with anti-LGBTQ+, anti-same-gender marriage, anti-abortion positions (in Poland since 2020, abortion is only authorized in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger; in Hungary, since 2022, a decree obliges women to listen to the heart of the fetus before having the possibility of having an abortion).

Social networks are a fantastic way to disseminate populist ideas, firstly because the traditional media are considered complicit with the elites in place, then because they escape all control and allow anyone to position themselves as an expert (we saw it during the Covid-19 crisis and we see it again with the war in Ukraine and the presence of many pro-Russian, anti-American positions).

Ipsos | Almanac | Elections | Italy

 

Italian laboratory

Italy embodies another way. Fratelli d'Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni since 2014, is the country's leading force with 26% of the vote for the early Legislative elections on September 25. It is wrong to speak of it as a populist fascist party; its program is reminiscent of the right, social paternalism and protectionism, security and immigration control, but Fratelli d'Italia is neither anti-European, nor radically sovereigntist, nor morally conservative. It is undoubtedly this balance that made the Italians want to try a new party. Radical populism has dropped significantly: the 5-star movement has fallen from 10.7 million voters in 2018 to 4.3 in 2022, Forza Italia (Berlusconi) from 4.6 to 2.3, and the party " Italexit” gathered only 2.6 million voters. Will Italy be a laboratory for the parties of a “new right” that is both social and liberal?

Ipsos | Almanac | Elections | Yellow vest

 

Indicators of populism

The points to monitor to see if a society is tempted by populism are its relationship to institutions (the less people trust the authorities, the more they want anti-system alternatives), social and economic issues (fear of unemployment, accentuation of inequalities, inflation), a  feeling of downgrading and pessimism (if we believe that the situation "will be worse for my children", we may regret the Golden Age praised by the populists), the feeling of abandonment (the leaders do not care), and finally, fear and rejection of immigration (desire for nativism).

The “Broken System Sentiment”survey shows that in 2022, on average across 28 countries, 64% of the adults surveyed agree that their country’s economy is rigged to favour the rich and powerful, 63% think that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like them, 59% think that their country needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful, and 59% think that experts don’t understand the lives of people like them. Just 45% agree that, to fix it, their country needs a strong leader willing to break rules: the limits of populism?

It is not by chance that we see that the lower a person's income is, the more likely they are to develop populist feelings, more sensitive to authoritarian discourse, and more likely to move away from the democratic model as we have known since the end of the Second World War in many countries. Overall, while populism has receded in 2020, its underlying causes remain potent, and the crises of the 2020s – as in the 1920s – mean democracy faces still more internal challenges in the years ahead.

Yves Bardon
Nando Pagnocelli

The author(s)