Populism Wanes As Crises Recede

LONDON — President Donald J. Trump’s push for a border wall hints at a problem that populist leaders are facing across the Western world.

After a year of setbacks, populist leaders are trying to rejuvenate their fortunes by revitalizing the sense of crisis on which they thrive. But as with Mr. Trump’s demand for a border wall — which brought a government shutdown — this may say more about populism’s weakness than its strength.

Immigration and terrorism crises, which aided populism’s rise in 2016, have waned. Populists have faced disappointing election results in Germany, the United States and even Poland.

The West’s populist leaders have grown defensive, retreating into ever-starker messages of us-versus-them. The approach excites their most dedicated followers. But it can be risky, forcing voters to pick sides at a moment when the populist right holds declining appeal.

Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, has predicted that the movement’s oncefast rise will become “modest” and “uneven” this year, with more setbacks.

Populism is hardly dying. It holds power in the United States, Italy and a few Eastern European countries, as well as meaningful parliamentary minorities in much of Western Europe, where populist parties now win about one in six votes.

Still, without a crisis to justify populism’s hard-line policies, its message has been stripped to its most core element: opposition to liberal ideals of pluralism, multiculturalism and international cooperation.

The result is a new phase in the populist era, one that will test populism’s appeal — and that of its ideological rival, postwar establishment liberalism — as never before.

This story, playing out across Western democracies, may be encapsulated best by the drama of Mr. Trump, the government shutdown and the border wall.

Two years after he won the presidency, threats supposedly posed by immigration and terrorism in the United States