One in five Europeans (a total of 55.8 million people) voted for a populist party in 2016 and 2017, according a new study by the European Policy Information Center. The think tank analyzed electoral data in EU member states as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia, and Montenegro and found the vote share for authoritarian populist parties jumped from 10.6% in 1980 to 18.4% in 2017.
Most of this success has been quite recent. The average vote share of populist parties increased by only 1 percentage point from 1980 to 2000, but then jumped by 7 percentage points from 2000 to 2017.
The vote share for populist parties has overtaken support for liberalism in the last two decades. Over the same period, there’s been a decline for support for mainstream ideologies, including of conservatism and Christian democracy (down 4.7 percentage points), while support for social Democracy has decreased by 4.1 percentage points. [...]
The last decade has also seen the return of the radical left. The vote share of these parties declined between 1980 and the late 2000s, but gained ground over the last seven years. The radical left increased its average vote share to 6.3% in 2017. The examples of left-wing populists included in the report were Spain’s Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (a far-left presidential candidate), who plans to make a ruckus in the French parliament.
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