Why Is Populism Rising Across the World?
Populism is not a new phenomenon, but its current wave is unusually broad. From Viktor Orbán in Hungary and
Populism is not a new phenomenon, but its current wave is unusually broad. From Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States, politicians running on explicitly populist platforms have won elections across every major region of the world over the past two decades. Why is populism rising so consistently, across such different countries and political cultures? The answer requires looking past the personalities and into the conditions that make this kind of politics so persistently appealing.
What Populism Actually Is
At its core, populism is a political framework built on one central claim: that society is divided between two opposing groups, a pure and virtuous “people” and a corrupt “elite,” and that the will of the people must prevail absolutely. University of Georgia political scientist Cas Mudde has described this division as fundamentally moral rather than economic: it is always, in his words, “the pure against the corrupt.”
Two things follow from this. First, majority rule is treated as the only legitimate form of governance. Minority rights, institutional checks, and opposition voices are framed as obstacles to the people’s will rather than features of a functioning democracy. Second, the populist leader positions themselves as the sole authentic representative of that will, which conveniently makes any challenge to their authority an attack on the people themselves.
Stanford’s Global Populisms Project, led by political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse, is direct about what this means in practice: populism almost never improves the material conditions of the people it claims to champion. Critically, the project notes that populism tends to draw support not from those who have suffered the most economically, but from those who fear losing their current standing in society.
The Economic Background
The most direct answer to why populism is rising comes from economics. To understand it fully, you have to trace the economic trajectory of the past several decades.
From the 1970s onward, real wages across much of the developed world stagnated. Deindustrialisation, accelerated by trade liberalisation agreements including GATT and China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, moved millions of jobs out of manufacturing and into a service economy. Sociologist Vaclav Smil has argued that this shift was structurally significant: manufacturing jobs provided specialised knowledge, opportunities for collective bargaining, and a clear path to the middle class that service work generally does not. Service employment tends to be polarised between high-skill, high-wage roles and low-wage jobs with little upward mobility.
The 2008 financial crisis sharpened these tensions considerably. Governments intervened heavily to stabilise financial institutions while ordinary workers absorbed losses through unemployment, wage cuts, and falling home values. For many communities, this confirmed a suspicion that had been building for years: that economic policy was designed to protect those at the top.
Research supports a direct link between these conditions and populist voting. Studies found that Americans who lost manufacturing jobs in the 2010s were significantly more likely to abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Trump in 2016. In Europe, workers whose earnings were reduced by competition with lower-wage immigrant labour were more likely to feel threatened by globalisation and to vote for right-wing populist parties. Trump also increased Republican support among Black working-class voters by four percentage points between 2012 and 2016, the same margin by which he grew the white working-class vote, suggesting the shift was driven more by class and economic anxiety than by racial identity alone.
The Paradox of Populist Leaders
One of the more striking features of modern populism is the profile of its leaders. Despite claiming to speak for ordinary working people, most prominent populist politicians come from backgrounds that are anything but ordinary.
Trump is a self-described billionaire real estate developer. Bolsonaro served as a congressman and military officer for decades before becoming Brazilian president. Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a career far-right politician who founded the National Front. Duterte worked as a lawyer and mayor for thirty years. Modi, perhaps the most modest in origin, has spent over four decades as a professional politician.
What these leaders share is not background but technique. They adopt plain, often deliberately provocative language that signals distance from political convention. They project unwavering certainty. And they cultivate the impression that they alone understand what ordinary people are experiencing, an impression that proves surprisingly durable even when their policies suggest otherwise.
The Institutional Damage
The consequences of populist governance tend to follow a recognisable pattern regardless of geography or ideology.
Once in power, populist leaders typically move to weaken the institutions that could check their authority. Courts are packed or undermined. Press freedom is curtailed through legal pressure or direct attacks on media credibility. Electoral processes are questioned when results are unfavourable. Oversight bodies are dismissed as instruments of the corrupt elite.
Hungary offers the most documented example. Orbán, who has governed since 2010, progressively restructured the country’s judiciary, media landscape, and electoral rules. By 2022, the European Parliament formally concluded that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy.
In the United States, the pattern took different forms: calling the press the “enemy of the people,” resisting congressional oversight, claiming elections are “rigged,” and framing career civil servants as a “deep state” working against the public interest. The Stanford project describes this trajectory as “a gradual slide into authoritarianism, each step justified by the need to better root out disloyal elements.”
Populists also face a structural problem once in office: they rarely deliver the transformation they promise. This makes institutional erosion not just ideologically convenient but practically necessary. Without it, voters might hold them accountable for the gap between their promises and their record.
What Reduces Populism’s Appeal
Understanding why populism is rising also points toward what might slow it down. The research is consistent: reducing the economic insecurity that makes populist arguments credible in the first place is the most effective long-term response.
Concrete policy measures that researchers have identified include job guarantee programmes, portable benefits tied to workers rather than employers, affordable housing initiatives, and expanded unemployment insurance. These address the underlying conditions, particularly instability and loss of economic status, that drive people toward movements promising radical change.
The broader implication is straightforward if politically difficult. Populism tends to fill the space left by mainstream institutions that have failed to respond adequately to economic dislocation. The question of why populism is rising is, at its core, a question about what those institutions have failed to deliver, and for whom. The most effective counter is not better communication strategy but better policy outcomes, particularly for working-class communities that have seen their economic position erode over decades and have found little in the mainstream political offer that speaks to that experience.
Sources
- Grzymala-Busse, A. et al. “Global Populisms and Their Challenges.” Stanford Global Populisms Project. HowStuffWorks: Why Is Populism So Popular Again?
- Kelemen, R.D. “Populism Can Degrade Democracy but Is on the Rise.” The Conversation, June 26, 2024. Read the full article
