How populism always ends
Two political failures less than five months apart offer some hope that the rampant right-wing populism we’re seeing around the world today will pass. First, U.S. voters delivered a noteworthy rebuke to the leadership of President Donald Trump in the midterm elections last November. Then, on March 31, Turkish voters punished their president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with a defeat in local elections that many observers called a pivotal moment of change.
The specific reasons for the losses were somewhat different, but the similarities were striking. In the lead-up to the midterms, worried about losing their majority in the House of Representatives, Republican candidates leaned heavily on Trump’s popularity with their conservative base. At rallies, Trump was the focus of attention. It seemed the election was less about local issues and more about the Trumpian vision for America and its place in the world.
What was ignored, though, was what mattered most to voters: health care, jobs, declining incomes and a precarious economic future. The Republicans lost the House in a landslide.
In Turkey, the governing AK Party, which is also concerned about losing control over local politics in its municipal elections, turned to its own popular, and populist, leader. Erdogan embarked on an epic campaign in support of the AK Party’s candidates for mayor in cities across Turkey, delivering as many as eight speeches a day. Like Trump, he eschewed local issues like Turkey’s deepening economic crisis, rampant inflation or high unemployment. He barely acknowledged the candidates he was supposed to be endorsing. Instead, he talked about the greatness of Turkey, the threats it faced and how only the AK Party could lead the nation to the global eminence it deserves.
At the polls, Turks punished the AK Party for that. The capital, Ankara, and the economic hub of Istanbul—Turkey’s biggest cities and for years AK Party strongholds—both fell to the opposition People’s Republican Party. Other cities that had also been under AK Party control fell, too.
In both cases, Trump and Erdogan turned politics into a personality cult. “Erdogan made this election about his leadership and his vision for Turkey,” Ilter Turan, a professor emeritus of political science at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said. “And now he will have to deal with the fallout.”
Is populist leadership failing? Not everywhere, of course, but in Western democracies at least, the experiment with right-wing populism appears to have run into a few snags. With Brexit, Britain’s right-wing ideologues have hurtled their country down the path of economic crisis; in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s populist economic policies, including slashing borrowing costs and opening the floodgates to cheap credit, have triggered concerns at the European Central Bank; in Italy, the anti-immigrant and antiEU coalition government led by Giuseppe Conte can’t seem to get anything done.
Populists in all of these countries, not to mention Trump and Erdogan, bullied their way into office through fear— of immigrants, socialists, liberals or anything else with the scent of non-traditional values—and have maintained their power through a toxic blend of populist economic policies and warnings of enemies all around.
What they have failed to do is deliver the prosperity their nationalist policies were supposed to produce. When Erdogan came to power in 2002, he promised to transform Turkey’s economy. But the boom that followed was an illusion built on government spending and cheap credit. Today, Turkey faces its worst economic crisis in two decades.
Both Erdogan and Trump seem so enamoured with their own worldviews that they are incapable of digesting contrary facts, especially economic ones. “They believe they, and they alone, are right,” says Gunduz Findikcioglu, the chief economist at Dunya newspaper, Turkey’s leading economic publication. “On occasion they may cede to advisers, but it usually doesn’t last and they return to beliefs that have no basis in any logical economic theory.”
Erdogan, for instance, has shocked economists by claiming that the way to control inflation is to lower interest rates. Trump has said that tariffs are a net benefit to the U.S. economy, but recent data shows they are costing the U.S. $1.4 billion a month.
In the U.S., most economists agree that the real pain from Trump’s economic policies is yet to come. In Turkey, that economic reckoning is now.
Fortunately for Erdogan, there won’t be another election in Turkey until 2023, which gives him enough time to right the economic course. But will he? As recently as last week, he again argued that Turkey’s Central Bank needs to lower interest rates to bring inflation under control and blamed the economic crisis on a U.S.-led plot to destroy Turkey through economic warfare.
Trump has less time. According to economic predictions, the U.S. will face the brunt of the negative impacts of his economic policies in 2020, an election year. It seems unlikely that he will shi course before then—or, even if he does, if there will be enough time for any shi s to make a difference.
TRUMP AND ERDOGAN BULLIED THEIR WAY INTO OFFICE. WHAT THEY HAVE FAILED TO DO IS DELIVER PROSPERITY.
Whether Trump will pay for it at the ballot box is an open question, but the record of populist leaders around the world suggests he’s in for a rough ride. People will put their ideological beliefs aside when their economic prosperity is at stake, and the only thing populists know how to do is push ideological buttons. When it comes to economic levers, they pull with reckless abandon. And they will fail.