Conservative populism has now firmly established itself as a significant force in most of the Western world. It remains unclear, however, whether it can build on that to become a dominant power.
The evidence of significance is overwhelming. Populist parties regularly receive twenty or more percent in national elections, at times exceeding thirty percent. Leaders such as Donald Trump, Sanae Takaichi, and Giorgia Meloni have gained power by allying those forces with elements of the old center-right to win majoritarian elections, something that leaders in Eastern Europe such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have long been able to do.
The overall record is nonetheless mixed. France’s National Rally gained significant ground in this month’s local elections, but it nonetheless was rarely able to win in the crucial second round. Left-leaning voters will still rally around even conservative candidates to prevent a populist win, while many conservatives remain unwilling to join the broad coalition of the right urged upon them by Marion Maréchal and Éric Ciotti.
Portugal and Germany are other examples of countries with populist parties that are fast gaining support yet remain off limits to other mainstream parties leading coalitions. Germany’s main center-right group, the Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union, would still rather team up with the center-left Social Democrats or Greens than the populist Alternative for Germany. Portugal’s center-right Democratic Alliance is making the same choice, depending on support from their traditional Socialist Party adversary rather than currying favor with André Ventura’s Chega.
This creates a conundrum for these leaders. Should they emulate Meloni and Trump and cut deals with the old right, even at the expense of significant portions of their agenda? Or should they just persevere in the hope that the tide will soon flow in their direction?
Either course carries risk. Choose moving to the center and a party could go so far that the voters they attract from the old left decide that the new right isn’t different from the old right they reject. Stay the course and you could stay out of power for a long time.
A country’s election and party system will also dictate how conservative populist parties behave. A majoritarian system tends to push a party towards trying to cooperate with or co-opt the old right. But in Great Britain, the splintering of the party system into three national left-leaning or left-wing parties plus two additional regional left-leaning parties means that the conservative populist Reform Party is better off pushing to the right. Forecasts show that it can win an election with only 30 percent of the vote.
Over time, however, these choices will tend to converge towards similar outcomes. A decade from now, conservative populists will gain if the elite consensus fails to solve the problems that are driving the conservative populist surge. Grand coalitions can hold the purported barbarians at the gate for a while, but voters ultimately will give even radical parties their shot at power when the alternatives seem hopeless.
On that score, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz seems to be perhaps the West’s most consequential non-populist leader. With Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer mired in historically low approval numbers and France’s Emmanuel Macron’s centrists fading quickly from the scene, Merz’s grand coalition with the Social Democrats is the last large nation government with a chance to show it can restore economic growth, increase national security, and reduce the social disruption that mass immigration has wrought.
The initial signs are mixed. Merz’s CDU/CSU faction is polling lower than its results in last year’s election, although it has recovered a bit since January. The conservative populist AfD is up, both in polls and in two recent state elections, as is the far-left Left party. Merz will need to deliver by the time the next federal vote occurs in March 2029 if he wants to forestall the shift to the extremes in both directions.
The state of the economy is likely to be the most important question for conservative populists over the next decade. They universally draw from people making less money and with less formal education, but some polls also show a direct correlation between perceived economic situation and openness to populist appeals.
In the U.K., for example, Reform does best among voters who “often struggle to make ends meet” and worst among those who are “very comfortable financially.” Support for the left-wing Green Party shows an identical correlation. In the two most recent German state elections, both held in the former West Germany, support for both the AfD and the Left is much higher among those who say their financial situation is bad than among those who say it is good.
That potentially makes the impact of artificial intelligence incredibly important for populism’s future. Virtually unqualified support for AI is among the core tenets of the cross-partisan elite consensus. As they once said about globalization, the development of AI is supposed to lift all economic boats by increasing productivity. If that happens, then they should be handsomely rewarded at the ballot box.
Globalization’s actual outcome, however, should give one pause. That sea change enriched people with advanced degrees and access to financial capital, while it damaged life prospects for people who work with their hands or on their feet. That is a significant reason why in all nations those with lower incomes and lower levels of education—and especially those classified as manual laborers—have swung so rapidly towards conservative populism.
The AI revolution could have a similar effect on the degree-holding class. British pollster James Kanagasooriam published a fascinating paper last year that looked at what types of jobs are currently at risk of being automated by AI. Jobs with high degrees of verbally specific skills are at high risk of automation. And it turns out that those jobs are found, both in Britain and America, in communities that have done very well economically over the last decades and remain bastions of anti-populist sentiments.
If AI displaces large numbers of jobs via automation, that will leave large numbers of white-collar, degree-holding voters without a means to finance the middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyles they are accustomed to. They will be in exactly the circumstances that blue-collar workers were when their jobs were exposed to globalization, with one exception: they can’t be told to “learn how to code” because entry-level coding will now be performed by AI.
We should then expect the displaced white-collar worker and his/her family to react in the same way their blue-collar fellow citizens reacted in the last decade. They may swing to left-wing populists in greater numbers, but many will swing rightward. Any significant hollowing out of the remaining consensus voters puts the traditional center-right supporter in a massive bind. And we know from history what old center-right voters do when their only viable choices are a populist left and a populist right.
Those who want to resist this analysis should look at how the social democratic left rose from obscurity to dominance within fifty years. It first gained strength among the working class but remained unable to seize power in most nations for years until the twin elite failures of the mid-20th century—the Great Depression and World War II—changed voters’ minds. It took social and economic catastrophe to push democratic polities to embrace the welfare state and Keynesianism, but embrace it they did until the next set of elite failures produced the neoliberal correction of the 1980s that produced our current cross-partisan consensus.
Events do matter, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous dictum reminds us. Those who think the current elite consensus can, with a few tweaks, solve the West’s challenges, still believe that populism can be contained. Those who don’t, and all populist leaders fall into this class, can look forward to a potentially bright conservative populist future. Today may remain in the elite’s hands, but tomorrow might belong to the outsiders.