While in retreat, populism ups its attack on liberals

LONDON — President Donald 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 and parties 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 has brought a twoweek government shutdown — this may say more about populism’s weakness than its strength.

Immigration and terrorism crises, which aided populism’s world-shaking rise in 2016, have waned. Populists have faced disappointing election results in Germany, the United States and even Poland, shattering the image of the movement’s inevitability and its claims to represent true popular will.

The West’s populist leaders and parties 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 and leading scholar of populism, has predicted that the movement’s once-meteoric rise will become “modest” and “uneven” in 2019, with more setbacks ahead.

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 reliably win about 1 in 6 votes.

Still, without a crisis to justify populism’s hard-line policies, its message has been stripped down 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.

A rocky year

Populists in Europe had a rocky year.

In Britain, support for Brexit has slipped below 50 percent. Polls suggest a majority of voters want a second referendum. Brexit hard-liners in the governing Conservative Party tried and failed to eject Theresa May, the prime minister, over her support for a softer Brexit.

In Germany, the rise of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party, has stalled. It performed worse than expected in elections in the border state of Bavaria, where immigration is a major issue, and worse than it fared a year earlier.

When Bavaria’s centerright party tried to co-opt the populist message and challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel over immigration, it suffered election losses.

Ms. Merkel survived, her approval rating spiked and she lined up a centrist successor.

Many Western populists are falling back to their message of besiegement and threat, as much out of the paranoid worldview that is central to populism as out of any conscious strategy.

Brexit hard-liners are pointing to the 470 people who illegally crossed the English Channel by boat last year, a drop in the bucket compared with the hundreds of thousands of arrivals to Europe in 2015 and 2016.

But dividing the world into us versus them works only if voters want to belong to “us” and oppose “them,” typically establishment elites and cultural outsiders.

In Europe, many more voters have had contact with migrants since 2016, which research suggests can lessen fear and resentment. In the United States, the buoyed economy has undercut fears of economic competition from immigrants.

Curious case of Sweden

One of the countries most often cited as a populist success last year may also underscore the movement’s challenges.

The Sweden Democrats, a populist party, won 17.5 percent of the vote, its highest share ever, in a national election in September. If populists could surge this high, this fast even in Sweden, a bastion of liberalism, surely it represented a global shift.

But polls tell a different story.

Support for the Sweden Democrats has not grown since the end of 2015, just as the refugee crisis began tapering off.

And the party’s share of the vote last year was only slightly more than that of Dutch far-right populists in 2017, which had been considered a disappointing setback for the movement.

Sweden’s experience may suggest that Western populists rose only with the refugee and terrorism crises and that, as those crises have faded, populism has stalled out well below the numbers needed for it to sustainably hold power.

But there is another way to read cases like Sweden: not as the populist wave cresting, but as the liberal consensus breaking.

Even if populists win power only occasionally, struggle in office and mostly consign themselves to an angry minority, that they play any role at all represents a seismic change.