Priti Patel’s ultimate victory won’t be merely if Australia-style Rwanda flights ever take off. It will be if Labour sends them.
When they were mass-membership institutions, parties used to be able to integrate their populist extremes. Now, through a more diverse mass media, as well as the social media revolution, they are much less effective gatekeepers.
Four, deep-rooted currents in are carving out space for movements which seek to prioritise the interests, the culture, the values, and the ways of life of the majority group against what they see as self-interested, corrupt, narcissistic, and incompetent elites.
The defeat of these parties is above all a task for the moderate Right.
This European “nationalism” could well produce a considerably more populist EU. Whether that would be good for the UK is another matter.
As Europe turns to the right and a Trump return looms over the White House, Britain bucks the trend by appearing to be heading for a Labour government.
His victory in the Dutch elections was only possible because the mainstream parties had failed to control the country’s borders.
The country’s Prime Minister is a classic cakeist – berating the EU on the one hand, but not seeking to leave on the other.
By seeing off Le Pen and electing the most ideologically pro-EU president since Giscard d’Estaing, France has changed the game.
Will the UK get a deal? Much depends on whether other European governments or the EU Commission take charge on the other side of the table.
Politicians like Geert Wilders who want to ban the Quran and who treat all Muslims as “the enemy within” are doing ISIS’s work for them.
With growing problems at home, many member states are at odds with the Commission’s punitive line on Brexit.
He is a talented populist and looks set to do well in next week’s Dutch election. The question is what he will do then.
Are we seeing a convulsion as great as 1968 – or even 1848?
Yet unlike insurgent parties in other countries, the Conservatives have time and again made themselves the party of a status quo that serves only the interests of older voters.