Dutch conservative populist Geert Wilders’ defeat in the recent general election seems superficially to be good news for the European center-left. It is in fact nothing of the sort—indeed, far from it.
The fact is that conservative populism’s appeal shows every sign of growth in most nations. That, not the occasional center-left victories or polling leads, is the primary lesson from 2025’s global political elections and trends.
Holland’s late October vote is a case in point. Yes, Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) lost 11 seats, declining from 37 to 26 in the 150-seat lower house. But most of those were picked up by two other conservative populist parties, JA21 and the Forum for Democracy (FvD). In fact, the four right-populist parties won 46 seats between them, only two fewer than in the 2023 vote that elevated Wilders.
Elections in the Czech Republic and Poland were further examples that establishment coalitions combining non-populist parties from the center-left to the center-right are losing ground. The European Union’s bete noire, the Law and Justice party, won this June’s presidential election, while former prime minister Andrej Babis’ Yes (ANO) party will form a government combining three right-populist parties following that coalition’s decisive win in early October.
Grand coalitions are faring no better in Western Europe. Denmark’s three-party government is polling under 35 percent with elections coming next year. Conservative populist parties, once thought to have been extinguished by the Social Democrats’ adoption of their migration policies, are on the rise in polls. The three right-populist parties are getting around 20 percent in recent polls, up from about 14 percent in 2022’s election.
Germany, France, and Austria’s centrist governments are also falling fast in the polls. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now leads in many polls, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and allies to its right have gained 6 points just since last July’s vote. Austria’s three-party government is in free fall, dropping from a combined 56 percent in last September’s election to 49 percent. The right-populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) has soared 8 points in that span and now easily leads all polls.
Even apparent victories haven’t curbed populism’s appeal. Romanian establishment parties rallied to beat populist George Simion in this year’s rescheduled presidential election, but Simion won a massive 46 percent, and his party easily leads in polls for parliament. Portugal’s center-right Democracy Alliance (AD) won this summer’s snap election, but the populist Chega surpassed the center-left Socialists to become that nation’s second-strongest party. Polling in recent months shows Chega is even stronger today.
The result is clear. Conservative populists have received nearly a quarter of the vote in the most recent national elections in thirty European countries, according to recent data. These data understate the true level of populist backing, as they exclude the polling surges mentioned earlier as well as those found in countries like Great Britain, where polls show support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has more than doubled since last year’s election.
The populist trend isn’t just found in Europe. Chile’s election polls show that two conservative populists, Jose Kast and Johannes Kaiser, are getting around 35 percent between them, more than all left-leaning candidates combined. A massive surge in illegal immigration, as elsewhere, is one reason for this surge.
Even nations with low levels of illegal migration, however, are seeing strong populist gains. Australia’s Labor Party won an historic victory in May but is already slightly behind its first preference support in recent polls. Populist right icon Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, meanwhile, has more than doubled in support.
One country is a point, two might be a coincidence, but thirty-two is as clear a trend as you’re going to see. One could name even more, but the point is clear: conservative populism’s support is rising.
The reason why isn’t difficult to discern. No major country has solved the problems stemming from slow economic growth and its unequal distribution among citizens. Neither has any stopped the culture wars that the combination of woke social policy and mass immigration has created. Throw in the unstable international situation, and it’s easy to see why people are looking at radical alternatives.
It’s much harder to think about how establishment parties can counteract the trend. Adopting tough asylum policies can help, but Denmark proves it’s not a panacea. Restoring widely shared economic growth and cultural stability seems also to be important, but those are challenges that might be beyond establishment thinking.
Center-left and center-right still support climate policies that, on the margin, impose heavy costs on people who drive or whose jobs use a lot of fossil fuels (think farmers and heavy industry). It’s not coincidental that the party that gave Babis his majority is named Motorists for Themselves.
They also still shy away from implementing the mass deportation policies that many voters favor. Center-left parties in particular may be willing to stop the immigrant inflow but have thus far balked at pushing out the millions of recent migrants whose asylum claims are often dubious. American progressive resistance to President Trump’s ICE raids is just one example of this phenomenon.
Cultural issues also matter to many populist voters. Those concerns differ from country to country: abortion is an issue for the right in America and Poland but not in most of Western Europe, for example. It’s not uncommon, however, for conservative populists to talk proudly about their national heritage and push back against woke narratives about colonization and race.
Conservative populists also tend to vociferously oppose the trans agenda even as they normally back gay and lesbian rights. AfD leader Alice Weidel is an example of this. A lesbian married mother, she nonetheless shares her party’s opposition to gender ideology and supports the traditional family as a social bedrock.
These trends are posing serious challenges to the global center-right, too. While many populist voters are former adherents to the left, perhaps more are defecting from more establishment-focused center-right parties. They, too, are burdened by their roles in creating the neoliberal, global, socially progressive order against which conservative populists rebel.
Those parties, however, can often find it easier to accommodate—and therefore moderate—the populists’ concerns. Center-right parties in Sweden, Norway, Italy, and Finland have all allied with populists to their right in government, often to mutual benefit. Establishment Republicans are often unhappy with their subordinate role in the new GOP, but they retain influence because they have chosen to stay in the broad conservative tent. Trump’s two large tax cut bills should be thought of as gifts to the old guard to keep them in the coalition rather than any priority for Trump himself.
Center-left politicians, however, face potential rebellion from their base voters if they move to conciliate populist preferences. Britain’s Green Party and the nascent Your Party are essentially leftist rebellions against Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s unsteady and inconsistent efforts to combat Reform’s rise. Recent polls show the Greens soaring since the election of young ultra-progressive Zack Polanski as their new leader, even surpassing Labour in some surveys.
Nor is it clear that a left-populist approach melding left-wing economics with right-wing immigration policy will attract former voters. Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht tried that angle when she left the former-Communist Left Party to establish her own party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Its support faded during this year’s campaign, and the party finished just below the five percent needed to gain parliamentary representation.
Meanwhile, the seemingly doomed Left Party revitalized itself by choosing a 36-year-old woman, Heidi Reichinnek, as its co-leader for the campaign. Her fiery opposition to AfD and sophisticated social media presence catapulted her party from 3 percent in January polls to nearly 9 percent of the vote on election day. Today the Left Party averages around 11 percent in polls, while Wagenknecht recently stepped down from leading her eponymous party.
The left won’t tolerate moving right, while moving right may not win back the voters the center-left needs. That’s the conundrum facing mainstream opponents to the right, and there’s no easy way out.
Resisting the rightward populist drift from the left probably requires some combination of ramping up economic growth, reversing immigration flows, and slowing down the steady drift toward progressive social and climate fighting goals. How leaders like Australia’s Anthony Albanese, Canada’s Mark Carney, and Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre fare in this effort in the coming years will provide a clear test of whether such a strategy is politically and economically feasible.
American Democrats who want to move in that direction, like the authors of the recent study “Deciding to Win,” must overcome an obstacle no other center-left movement faces: mass voter primary elections. Other parties select their leaders and platforms largely behind closed doors. America’s open primary process means over 36 million voters will decide what path its left will take.
Threading that needle in open, multi-candidate combat will be difficult for party centrists. The lure of the White House means they won’t have the clear primary field Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger had in Virginia. There will be a strong progressive challenger, someone who will emerge as the champion of what former Vermont Governor Howard Dean called in the 2004 primaries “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” That person will have a large and eager audience ready to hear their message.
More than 60 percent of 2020 Democratic presidential primary voters called themselves very or somewhat liberal, according to the exit polls, a sea change from 1992, when centrist Bill Clinton won the nomination. Those voters tend to hold strong views on climate change, immigration, democracy, and progressive social issues that many Democratic centrists believe hold the party back. It’s much likelier that the eventual nominee conciliates those voters to unite the party rather than breaks with them to appeal to swing voters.
A Republican candidate’s unpopularity will not save the Democratic nominee. Trump has won two elections because he was the overwhelming choice of voters who disliked both candidates. It seems that faced with a selection between someone who is viewed as too populist and one who is viewed as too progressive, the populist wins.
That may seem to be a bleak prognosis for some, but one cannot cure an illness that remains undiagnosed. It remains far more likely that the Western world is about to enter a populist era than it is to return to normalcy.
Henry Olsen is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the weekly podcast, Beyond the Polls.
I'm jealous of the Europeans having so many choices of parties to support.
Glad to see a piece by Henry Olsen here. I'm a liberal, and he's a conservative, but I find some of his ideas very appealing.