The populist explosion

Populism lived a marginal existence in Europe for the better part of the 20th century. It is only from the late 1990s onwards that populism became a significant political phenomenon. In the time since then, populist parties have become an endemic and often dominant feature of European politics. A majority of countries now have at least one successful populist party and one of these is among the three largest parties in one third of European countries. While some of these parties were already consolidated at the turn of the millennium, the surge in European populism has also seen an array of new parties and movements. By comparison, populism has a longer history in South and North America, originally carrying connotations of progressive politics and democracy. In spite of this history of ‘normalized’ populism, however, the Americas are also facing new populist challenges. Taken together, all of these developments amount to what has been called a populist ‘explosion’ (Judis, 2016).

The populist explosion spans various national experiences with populism and the entire spectrum from Left to Right, including ‘both Trump and Sanders and both France's National Front and Spain's Podemos’ (Judis, 2016: 11), and it has propelled the issue of populism and its causes to the top the agenda in both political science and practical politics since the turn of the millennium. Getting to the root cause of the populist explosion has thus become a top priority in order to understand this mounting threat to the political order and democratic politics. The puzzle of populism and its causes has, however, provoked extensive debate but no universally accepted answer. Following a brief overview of some of the more widely discussed reasons for the populist explosion, the chapter is dedicated to exploring one possible explanation: that the new populist challenge has to a large degree been caused by the new technocracy. The purpose here is not to find the single cause of the recent rise of populism, but it does follow from the preceding chapters that technocracy should at the very least be seen as a key contributing factor.

In other words: how has the new technocracy and the substitution of governance for government contributed to the rise of populism, and what is the nature of the populist response to this development?