National Populist Parties Fighting Back Against Europe's Anti-Democratic Oligarchies
Experts say that surging National Populist movements are a revolt against the corrupt and anti-democratic leftist oligarchies that rule most western societies
Historians now agree that the Polish workers movement known as Solidarność – which arose in the 1980s and was inspired by the theme of solidarity in Catholic social teaching – was the beginning of the end for Communist tyranny in Europe.
The leaders of Solidarność campaigned against a powerful elite of corrupt politicians that pretended to care about the interests of workers and ordinary people but who, instead, used the state bureaucracy to enrich themselves and limit the freedoms of their fellow citizens.
Sound familiar?
Without firing a shot, the Solidarity movement accomplished in five years of peaceful protest what 40 years of armed standoffs and trillions of dollars in military spending could not achieve: it toppled the most powerful military dictatorship in history and freed half a continent.
Now, flash forward thirty years… and a new global movement has arisen that pursues many of the same goals.
Instead of a corrupt Communist bureaucracy, this new solidarity movement faces a global network of “woke” multinational corporations, Non-Governmental Organizations, media propaganda companies, human traffickers and corrupt left-wing politicians.
Like the old Communist nomenklatura, the members of this globalist network also pretend to care about ordinary people but are actually engaged in the largest transfer of wealth, from the many to the few, that the world has ever seen.
It is only recently that political scientists have been able to recognize and name what this new solidarity movement actually is.
In their 2018 book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, British academics Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin outlined just what national populism is… and what it is most assuredly is not.
Eatwell is emeritus professor of comparative politics at the University of Bath, while Goodwin is professor of politics at the University of Kent.
As social scientists, Eatwell and Boodwin do their best to look at the explosive growth of nationalist and populist parties around the world with the objectivity that corporate-controlled media outlets such as CNN and the Amazon-owned Washington Post no longer bother even to feign.
Their motto is, “In God we trust: all others bring data.”
According to Eatwell and Goodwin, National Populism is nothing less than a third major force in global politics, one that cannot easily be fit into traditional categories of the political Left and Right, conservative and liberal.
Like the Polish Solidarity movement, National Populists, according to the authors, “prioritize the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites.”
The authors reject the characterization of National Populist uprisings – such as the dual elections of Donald Trump or the vote by British citizens to leave the European Union (Brexit) – to be merely temporary temper tantrums of “angry white males” soon to be dispossessed by a rising generation of multicultural and tolerant millennials.
Rather, Eatwell and Goodwin argue, the data show that National Populist movements are a long-standing and deep-seated revolt against the anti-democratic corporate oligarchies that rule many western societies.
They remind their readers that the characterization of National Populist political parties as “fascist” or “extreme right-wing” is made by far-left partisans – in the media and government agencies – desperate to remain in power.
In fact, they say, National Populist leaders are fighting for more democracy, not less – insisting that governmental policies benefit the people of the nation they are supposed to serve, not multinational corporations.
Pointing to supporters of such figures as Donald Trump in the U.S., Georgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Eatwell and Goodwin say that “most national-populist voters want more democracy, not less – more referendums, and “more empathetic and listening politicians that give more power to the people and less power to established economic and political elites.”
Indeed, polling data reveal that national-populist voters are far from being the “basket of deplorables” that their political opponents and the controlled media claim, poor racist rednecks in America or “Little Englander” hooligans in Britain.
Rather, Brexit was approved by one in three black voters in Britain and half of voters aged thirty-five to forty-four.
In America, in the 2016 election Donald Trump won 47% of voters making more than $100,000 a year, 46% of political Independents and 36% of voters under age 29. He won 60% of non-Hispanic Catholics.
And in Italy, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, Spain, and most recently, Switzerland, national populist parties have surged in popularity among the dispossessed young who believe “bought and paid for” politicians give more aid and assistance to Islamic migrants than to their own people.
What’s more, recent elections show nationalist and right‑populist parties not just gaining ground but in some cases winning governing power or becoming central veto players across Europe.
Surveys and comparative studies estimate that populist parties of various stripes now hold roughly 30% or more of seats across Europe’s national parliaments, with nationalist and right‑populist forces particularly strong in Central and Eastern Europe and increasingly competitive in the big Western democracies.
These results have shifted the balance to the right in many national parliaments and in the European Parliament itself.
Consider the evidence:
In the June 2024 European Parliament elections, right‑wing populist and radical‑right parties increased their representation, with the Patriots for Europe and European Conservatives and Reformists blocs emerging as the third‑ and fourth‑largest groups. This means parties to the right of the traditional centre now hold over half of the seats, giving them greater leverage over EU migration, climate, and sovereignty‑related legislation.
By late 2024, far‑right or national‑populist parties were in government in at least seven EU states—Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovakia—either leading the government or as core coalition partners. In several other countries, such parties formally support minority governments from parliament, giving them effective veto power over policy.
In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieved a historic first‑place finish in the 2024 Thuringia state election and came a close second in Saxony, marking the first time a far‑right party has led a state parliament since World War II. The AfD also became the second‑largest German delegation in the European Parliament elections, ahead of the governing Social Democrats.
In Austria, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) won the largest share of the vote—around a quarter or more—in recent national‑level contests, positioning it as the leading political force and a likely pivot of government formation. These results underscore a consolidation rather than a passing “protest” vote.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) won the popular vote in the 2024 European elections with roughly a third of the vote, far ahead of President Macron’s centrist list. This performance was strong enough to prompt Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call snap elections, which significantly expanded RN’s parliamentary representation even though it stopped short of an outright majority.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with national‑conservative and post‑nationalist roots, has not only governed since 2022 but also topped the Italian vote in the 2024 European elections, reinforcing its mandate and confirming the weakness of the traditional centre‑left.
Denmark illustrates “policy convergence to the right” rather than a single populist party victory: even as the Social Democrats have led governments, they and other mainstream parties have adopted some of the harshest immigration and asylum restrictions in Europe, under pressure from parties like the Danish People’s Party and the newer Denmark Democrats. Analysts note that this cross‑party hardening on borders and refugee intake has partly “stolen the thunder” of the far right while also normalising their core positions in the political mainstream.
In Finland, the anti‑immigration Finns Party achieved its strongest national result in the 2023 parliamentary election (about one‑fifth of the vote), entering government as a key partner in a four‑party right‑wing coalition headed by the National Coalition Party. The government programme devotes extensive space to restrictive migration and integration measures, including halving the refugee quota, raising income thresholds for residence permits, tightening rules for unemployed migrants, and increasing police numbers.
Eatwell and Goodwin argue convincingly that National Populism is here to stay precisely because it addresses the real and legitimate concerns among many people that their societies are degenerating before their very eyes.
Voters for National Populist parties believe that corporate and government elites are plundering, for their own personal profit, a cultural and economic inheritance that took centuries to create.
And it is precisely the virtue of Solidarity – the habit of thinking about the common good of society and not merely corporate profits – that is driving many National Populist movements and political parties.
For example, in Sweden the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), a populist party that champions economic nationalism and conservative social values, is now the second largest party in Sweden, having won 20% of the vote in the 2022 elections.
The party is opposed to mass immigration but also advocate “economic nationalism” and support higher taxes on big corporations.
Throughout Europe, in fact, national populist parties are winning large portions of the electorate, despite being denounced by their opponents inevitably as “far right.”
(For so-called mainstream political parties and virtually the entire media establishment, any party that opposes limits on immigration at all is “far right.”) Yet as Foreign Policy magazine pointed out, in the European parliamentary elections, “A Far-Right Takeover of Europe Is Underway.”
“The cordon sanitaire is crumbling in many European nations,” the magazine states, referring to the way left-wing parties historically have been able to use political alliances to block centrist or conservative parties from taking power.
“In Italy, the far-right is in power, in Sweden the center-right government is backed by the far-right. In Austria, center-right and far-right have been in a coalition, and the latter is polling ahead of all others in the run up to national elections. In France, Marine Le Pen is leading the polls, and in Germany, the conservatives have hinted at future cooperation at a regional level with the far-right AfD.
In the end, the big question for Eatwell and Goodwin is whether the rapid growth of National Populist parties worldwide signals the end of a process that has gone on for thirty years… or just the beginning of a radical political realignment that will transform politics everywhere.
The two social scientists lean towards the latter view.
Increasingly, they say, voters view traditional parties, such as the Democrats and Republicans in America, or the Labour Party and Conservatives in the UK, as merely “private label” versions of the same basic product — a Uniparty — both controlled by billionaire elites indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people.
The more these voters learn, the authors say, the more inclined they were and are to throw the dice on “alternatives” – such as the National Rally in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, or even, in the 2024 election, Donald Trump in the United States.
Robert J. Hutchinson is an award-winning writer and the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Hutchinson is currently pursuing graduate studies in the Philosophy of Religion in Europe and writes for many publications.