Last summer I attended a closed-door gathering of political scientists in Segovia, Spain, surrounded by the medieval spires of the Castile and Leon region. The academics had flown in from across the world to spend a few days reviewing research on the vexed subject of “populism.”
One of the academics showed me a graph charting how the number of Google searches for “populism” had rocketed in 2016, around the time of the UK’s Brexit vote and the election of US president Donald Trump, and remained high ever since. For decades a niche topic mostly studied by specialists in Latin America, the study of populism was suddenly very much in vogue.
I was in Spain on a fact-finding mission. Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner and her deputy, Paul Johnson, had given me the green light to run a series exploring the rise of populism. The meeting in Segovia was an opportunity to consult experts on the subject that I had been grappling with for some time.
Illustration: Mountain People
In my previous Guardian roles — as Washington correspondent and San Francisco bureau chief — I had reported both on Trump’s extraordinary ascent to the White House and the similarly stunning success of US Senator Bernie Sanders, a once-fringe independent lawmaker from Vermont who transformed Democratic Party politics.
I had also spent months trying to understand how dominant technology platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — and the wider “attention economy” that makes them hugely profitable — were rewiring politics and creating an uneven playing field that might be tilted toward populist candidates.
Back in Europe, I recognized echoes of what I had seen in the US — populists on the left and right (although more so on the right) were gaining traction in countries as varied as Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Austria, Spain and Poland. Five of the world’s largest democracies were run by them, including India, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines.
I learned two things from my trip to Spain. The first was that academics who specialize in populism are exasperated at how frequently the term is overused or misapplied. The problem is especially acute in the UK, where commentators often use the term to refer to far-right, nativist politics, or use it as a shorthand for charismatic demagoguery.
My second discovery was that while lots of useful research has been conducted on populism, it was limited — and there was surprisingly little in the way of empirical research tracking populist discourse, campaigns or parties.
In the days that followed I worked with Guardian special projects editor Mark Rice-Oxley to sketch out the kinds of questions a series on populism would ask. What is populism exactly and where in the world is it taking root? Which parties and political leaders deserve the populist label and what happens when they get into power? Perhaps most difficult of all: Is rightwing populism, in particular, really on the rise, and, if so, why might that be?
None of these questions have a simple or uncontested answer. This was always going to be an exploratory project helping the Guardian better understand populism, even if that meant there were no definitive conclusions.
However, we thought it was important to stay faithful to a broadly accepted definition of the p-word. Simply put, populism is a language that frames politics as a battle between the will of ordinary people and corrupt or self-serving elites, and can exist on the left or right.
A few weeks later, we launched The New Populism, a series of essays and reported dispatches from locations as varied as Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, New Hampshire, Venice, Johannesburg, Delhi, Zurich, Glasgow and Hartlepool, England.
The most novel parts of the series were the research projects we conducted in partnership with political scientists, including several I met in Segovia. We created a partnership with Team Populism, a global network of political scientists, to analyze the hundreds of speeches by presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of 40 countries across the world.
A grant from theguardian.org, a US-based non-profit group, enabled us to hire 46 researchers who were trained to identify populist discourse in speeches.
The result was the Global Populism Database, the most up-to-date, comprehensive and reliable repository of populist discourse in the world — and the basis upon we which we were able to report that the number of populist leaders has more than doubled since the early 2000s.
Team Populism also helped us build a data visualization of how reliant Trump is on a teleprompter for his particular brand of rather inconsistent populism — and a hugely popular online quiz that allowed 1.5 million Guardian readers to answer several questions to discover how populist their own views were.
In another collaboration, we coordinated a team of 35 political scientists to peer-review a list of past and current populist parties in Europe. Our academic partners later helped us design and analyze a major global survey in partnership with YouGov, polling respondents in 23 countries to test populist sentiment across the world.
The New Populism series finished last month, culminating in European parliamentary elections in which populist parties secured almost one in three votes. Nowhere was the success of populists more stark than in the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Brexit party triumphed in last month’s election by capitalizing on discontent over the failure to enact the result of the EU referendum.
Brexit is only part of the story of a decline in trust in British elites that has long roots, as the sociologist Will Davies explained in one of a host of populism-themed essays we published in the Guardian’s Long Reads section.
It used to be said that the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system was a bulwark against insurgent populist parties. That may prove to be true, but the language of populism is everywhere in British politics these days. You hear it in the frequent vilification of political elites, the romanticization of ordinary or “real” people, the attacks on the media and the idea that politics is no longer just a battle of ideas, but a winner-takes-all conflict between good and evil.
It can pop up in sometimes unexpected places — from British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speeches, to the lexicon of those arch-Remainers who insist a “people’s vote” is the only legitimate response to a Brexit stitch-up contrived by powerful cabal of crooks and liars.
The Guardian’s six-month focus on populism has come to an end, but it seems inevitable that populism will be a subject the paper continues to report on for months and years to come.
In the first year of his second term, US President Donald Trump continued to shake the foundations of the liberal international order to realize his “America first” policy. However, amid an atmosphere of uncertainty and unpredictability, the Trump administration brought some clarity to its policy toward Taiwan. As expected, bilateral trade emerged as a major priority for the new Trump administration. To secure a favorable trade deal with Taiwan, it adopted a two-pronged strategy: First, Trump accused Taiwan of “stealing” chip business from the US, indicating that if Taipei did not address Washington’s concerns in this strategic sector, it could revisit its Taiwan
In a stark reminder of China’s persistent territorial overreach, Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from Arunachal Pradesh holding an Indian passport, was detained for 18 hours at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Nov. 24 last year. Chinese immigration officials allegedly informed her that her passport was “invalid” because she was “Chinese,” refusing to recognize her Indian citizenship and claiming Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. Officials had insisted that Thongdok, an Indian-origin UK resident traveling for a conference, was not Indian despite her valid documents. India lodged a strong diplomatic protest, summoning the Chinese charge d’affaires in Delhi and demanding
Immediately after the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) “Justice Mission” exercise at the end of last year, a question was posed to Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal regarding recent developments involving the exercises around Taiwan, and how he viewed their impact on regional peace and stability. His answer was somewhat perplexing to me as a curious student of Taiwanese affairs. “India closely follows developments across the Indo-Pacific region,” he said, adding: “We have an abiding interest in peace and stability in the region, in view of our significant trade, economic, people-to-people, and maritime interests. We urge all concerned
In the past 72 hours, US Senators Roger Wicker, Dan Sullivan and Ruben Gallego took to social media to publicly rebuke the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over the defense budget. I understand that Taiwan’s head is on the chopping block, and the urgency of its security situation cannot be overstated. However, the comments from Wicker, Sullivan and Gallego suggest they have fallen victim to a sophisticated disinformation campaign orchestrated by an administration in Taipei that treats national security as a partisan weapon. The narrative fed to our allies claims the opposition is slashing the defense budget to kowtow to the Chinese
RSS