Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore.
Against all the odds, Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election. Something new, important and disturbing has very clearly been happening recently right across the West, with ominous implications especially for the political estab-lishment. In addition to the astounding recent election outcome in the USA – very largely unexpected by those who thought they were in the know either side of the Atlantic – not long ago UKIP won more votes than any other party in the 2014 UK election to the European Parliament. More recently, the result of the June 2016 EU referendum in the UK was clearly substantially a vote against the establishment. In France, the Front Nationale is very likely to do well enough in the French presidential elections in 2017 for Marine Le Pen to be in the final ballot. In Germany Alternativ für Deutschland surprised Angela Merkel by beating her party’s CDU candidate in September 2016 in her own home state. In Spain, in December 2015, Podemos won 69 seats out of 350 in the Spanish general election. In Greece, Syriza has since January 2015 been the largest party in the Greek parliament. In Italy, in June 2016, the Five Star Movement won control of Rome and Turin1.
There are evidently overlapping reasons for these developments, although all the political movements involved are not, by any means, the same. Some are of the right and some of the left. Some have authoritarian streaks which others lack. Some are relatively liberal and outward looking while others are more orientated towards protectionism. All of them, however, share some common features. They are patriotic rather than internationalist. They all have varying concerns about immigration, reflecting the nativism – the feeling that indigenous residents ought to be given more consideration and support than immigrants – of a majority of their supporters. They all exhibit distrust and a measure of contempt for the established political systems.
