18 The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
1O
N AN icy January morning, twinkly
lights and the glow from chic cafés il-
luminate Hässleholm’s tidy streets. The
employment office opens its doors to a
queue of one. Posters in shop windows in-
vite locals to coffee mornings with immi-
grants asking: “What will you do to make
Sweden more open?” At first glance, this
small town fulfils every stereotype about
the country: prosperous, comfortable, lib-
eral. Butlast year it became the centre of a
political storm.
Mainstream Swedish politicians have
refused to co-operate in any way with the
Sweden Democrats (SD), a right-wing pop-
ulist party with extremist roots, since it was
formed in 1988. In 2015 Fredrik Reinfeldt, a
former prime minister and then still leader
of the centre-right Moderates, described
the SD’s leadership as “racists and the stiff-
ly xenophobic”. But a year ago the Moder-
ates used SDsupport to oust Hässleholm’s
centre-left local government and elect Pa-
trik Jönsson, the SD’s regional leader, vice-
chair of the new council. In November the
council adopted anSDbudget that would
cut spending on education and social care
for immigrants and build a new swimming
pool for locals instead. “We just want to
shut Hässleholm’s doors,” announced Mr
Jönsson. Per Ohlsson, a columnist on Syds-
venskan, the local newspaper, is alarmed:
“I get a growing feeling that liberal democ-racy is something we have taken for grant-
ed for too long.”
Some European politicians saw 2017 as
a welcome setback to the rise of populism
across the continent. After a 2016 in which
support for parties like the SD hit record
highs, and England and Wales voted for
Brexit, polls showed the populists’ popu-
larity falling (see chart on nextpage). Ma-
rine Le Pen of the Front National (FN) lost
the French presidential election to Em-
manuel Macron; her party fared poorly in
the subsequentelections forthe National
Assembly. The Alternative for Germany
(AfD) made it into the Bundestag for the
first time, but not to a degree that truly
threatened moderate politics. Two far-right
“Freedom” parties, the PVVin the Nether-
lands and the FPÖin Austria, did worse
than expected in their national elections.
The continuing rise of populism,
though, is something to measure decade
by decade, not year by year. The financial
crisis and the large influx of refugees con-
tributed to a spike, but Euro-populism has
been growing quite steadily since the
1980s. According to a new study by Yascha
Mounk of Harvard University and others
for the Tony Blair Institute, the populist
vote in an EUstate was, on average, 8.5% in- In 2017 it was 24.1%. This quantitative
increase is producing qualitative shifts in
the continent’s politics. As Hässleholm
shows, populists are no longer shunned by
the democratic mainstream as a matter of
course; they are increasingly called into co-
alitions, co-opted and copied.
Defining populism is notoriously sub-
jective, but political science provides some
guidelines. Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton
University singles out its exclusive claim to
represent a “morally pure and fully unified
people” betrayed by “elites who are
deemed corrupt or in some other way mor-
ally inferior”. Populism attacks judges,
journalists and bureaucrats itdeems not
on the side of the people. It speaks the lan-
guage of silent majorities, national humili-
ations, rigged systems; of “We are the peo-
ple” (Germany’s anti-Islam PEGIDA
movement), “Take back control” (Brexi-
teers), “This is our country” (the FN)—and,
elsewhere, “Make America great again”.
Cas Mudde of the University of Georgia
notes that populism is a “thin” ideology. It
can have hosts on the left as well as the
right and even create hybrids of its own,
such as the Five Star Movement (M5S)
which istopping Italian opinion polls in
the run-up to the general election in March.
It can also be practised by politicians
whose parties are not avowedly populist.
Such politicians can subscribe to a more or
less monolithic and exclusive vision of
“the people”; they can defend minority
groups, the judiciary and the free press to a
greater or lesser extent; they can choose
honesty about policy trade-offs over con-
venient scapegoats more or less frequently.
Their parties can inch along the spectrum
over time. So can whole societies.
Take Hungary. The Fidesz party led by
Viktor Orbán, the country’s authoritarian
prime minister, grew out of the anti-com-
munist movement and governed the coun-A dangerous waltz
BERLIN AND HÄSSLEHOLM
Europe’s populists are becoming more intertwined with the mainstreamBriefingEuropean populism