Four years after the populist ruptures of 2016 – the vote to leave the EU in the UK and Donald Trump’s election in the US – the academic literature and public debate are in broad agreement that a combination of cultural discontent, economic grievances and deficiencies of political representation lies behind the rise of populism. But as these factors have been overanalyzed, it is easy to forget that not all of them were present at the time of these populist successes.
By most indicators, by 2016 the American economy had fully rebounded from the economic recession. Similarly, while benefiting from the single market, the UK remained outside of arrangements like the Eurozone and Schengen it saw as burdensome. Hence, British elites could plausibly claim that the UK was enjoying the best of both worlds from EU membership. Yet it was this beneficial arrangement that a majority of British voters rejected.
Western grievances
The lesson from 2016, we now know, is that conventional indicators of economic prosperity and national interest that elites deploy to measure their achievements fail to capture all the grievances of western societies. This is an ominous realization for Europe’s biggest power and economy, Germany, as it now enters a period of sustained political crisis and stalemate.
