Week signals: Populism ad absurdum
Plus: watch points for Iran, the EU, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, and Israel.
Hello,
In this edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. The politics of anti-politics, Mar-a-lagabalus, a fever that may not break, and rubbish bin, rubbish out.
UP AHEAD. Talks with Tehran, a report in Brussels, Zelensky in Paris, tariffs on Brazil, and the dissolution of the Knesset.
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The Week in Review: A Hitler in every pot
The week began with a July 4 hangover and the beginning of a six-day funeral for Ali Khamenei (whose crowd, one must admit, was bigger than Donald Trump’s). It ended with Trump and those very same mourners back at it, before agreeing to return to last month’s liminal space between war and ceasefire.
We’ll cover Iran in greater detail on Monday, during our second Substack Live, available to all readers of Geopolitical Dispatch. We plan to do more of these as we approach critical junctures on key issues, but if you want to hear Damien and me talk more frequently, all you need to do is upgrade and join one of our live monthly roundtables, or have your organisation become a corporate member for these plus our in-depth quarterly briefings.
For today, I wanted to expand on something that we touched on in this month’s roundtable, and that’s the rise of populism. It was a topic raised with us by a client, given the rise of the far right in Europe. But it’s not just the far right, and it’s not just Europe. Whether it’s Marine Le Pen in France, or Zohran Mamdani in New York, politicians whose views would have been considered extreme ten years ago are not just now mainstream, but very popular. And this is not even an ideological phenomenon. Even a man who wears a bin on his head, and whose most notable policy is for 99p ice-cream and to nationalise Adele, now has a 19% chance of becoming the member for Clacton.
It may seem the height of trivia, but the looming battle between Nigel Farage of the populist right and Count Binface of the populist shite is probably the quintessence of what politics has become in this bizarre moment in time. It may be treated as a human-interest story, but the re-emergence of politics as spectacle, if not politics as meme, is also an essential topic for businesses and investors to understand.
It’s certainly not boring, but this doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Nor should it be surprising, with a former reality TV star now occupying the White House, and with a former comedian, once known for playing an everyman who accidentally became president, now president of Ukraine.
Populism, or anti-politics, has now become politics. We don’t need to debate why it’s here – whether due to generational economic dislocation, rapid demographic change, the atomising effects of social media, the legacy of Covid, the influence of malignant trillionaires, the agitprop of authoritarian states, or declining institutional trust – those arguments have been done to death.
Instead, with antithesis now the thesis of our age, it’s worth considering how populism could in turn impact economics, statecraft, regulation, and the business environment downstream. Desperate times, as history would have it, call for desperados. So what measures will they enact?
We’ve been through such cycles before, of course.
The French Revolution saw “friend of the people” Jean-Paul Marat, who spent most of his time in the bath, ordering mass executions. The 1930s and 40s had Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao. Modern Italy has seen the gamut, from Silvio Berlusconi to Beppe Grillo. Today’s South America, never far from the caudillo, has El Tigre in Colombia and El Loco in Argentina.
Yet in our contemporary era, under Pax Americana, populism had been relegated, until now, to fifth columns and fringes. While all politics is a popularity contest to some degree, it’s usually been tethered to constraints, norms and moderating compromises. And while even Trump is still today bound by the guardrails of the bond market, public opinion, and the Supreme Court, as his years, ego, and executive authority expand, we’re seeing the spectre of a Mar-a-Lago Elagabalus emerge.
So how do we prepare and respond to the return of untethered populism, whether ideological, extortionate, or iconoclastic?