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She also found, after analysing twenty-three European countries, that
populist party success had the most pronounced positive effect on political trust in
countries with comparatively low levels of democratic quality, corruption control,
and government performance. For countries with very high levels of democratic
quality, corruption control, and government performance, populist parties gaining
votes or parliamentary seats did not affect political trust at all. (Mauk 2020, 55)
These findings highlight that, as in the case of satisfaction and dissatisfaction
with democracy, our approach to populism must be more complex than
simply stating that this threatens or destroys democracy.
Another aspect of, or reason behind the rise of populism in Europe is
political polarisation. Fernando Casal Bértoa and José Rama claim that “party
politics in the continent have never been so polarized ... polarization has
almost tripled to the point that in most countries, the election with the highest
level of polarization since the Second World War has taken place in the last
10 years” (Casal Bértoa-Rama 2021, 2).
Political polarisation has economic, cultural, and institutional reasons.
Great economic crises are usually followed by the rise of extreme or anti¬
establishment parties, as a response to the failure of mainstream parties in
preventing and solving the storm. Cultural polarisation usually emerges
around divisive issues like abortion, death penalty, LGBTI-rights, or migration.
Institutional reasons can be the abovementioned feelings of unrepresented
people, which strengthen anti-establishment parties on both the left and the
right sides (Casal Bértoa and Rama 2021, 5-6).
All these are familiar to Europeans from the past fifteen years, and in
this respect the increasing polarisation is not a surprise but a quite evident
consequence of the previous decade and a half. However, populism does not
necessarily emerge from polarisation. As Sheri Berman and Hans Kundnami
observed, unlike in the US, where the polarisation has deepened partisanship
and weakened democracy,
European parties were converging ideologically and partisanship was diminishing
.. mainstream center-left and center-right parties in many European countries
began to converge to the point where they no longer offered voters clear alternatives
on many of the most pressing issues of the day. (Berman and Kundnami 2021, 23)
Wolfgang Streeck expresses similar views, claiming that
[b]y the end of the 1980s at the latest, neoliberalism had become the pensée unique
of both the centre left and the centre right ... Distributional conflict was replaced
by a technocratic search for the economically necessary and uniquely possible;
institutions, policies and ways of life were all to be adapted to this end. It follows
that all this was accompanied by the attrition of political parties - their retreat into