The European Union and the challenges of populism

Several recent elections have thrown the spotlight back onto populism in Europe. French local elections of March 2011 pushed the Front National back to its level of support 10 to 15 years ago (around 15%). Finland’s parliamentary elections of April 2011 made the “True Finns” Finland’s third party with 19%. Earlier, the entry of Geert Wilders’s party into the Dutch governing coalition (his Freedom Party is now the country’s third party with 24 seats) and the breakthrough of Sweden’s Democrats in parliamentary elections (5.7% and 20 seats) had already revived the heated debate over the rise of populism and placed it in a truly European context.

This debate is not new, dating back to the success of the Austrian FPÖ in the 2000s, which led several EU members to advocate “disciplinary” measures against the Austrian government of the time. Rather than any formal EU condemnation, the “sanctions” adopted involved suspending official bilateral relations between Austria and the then 14 other EU members. Their effect was based on the desire, more or less explicit, to assert common values and to safeguard the “spirit” of European democracy. The “Austrian crisis” had institutional consequences (detailed below) but above all it was the first collective response to a phenomenon which was once “localised” in certain countries but has now become a widespread “pathology”.