Debates about contemporary European politics increasingly focus on the putative threat of a resurgent populism. Worried observers sometimes point to the rise of far-right, xenophobic parties, especially in eastern Europe, but ordinary people’s backlash against the European Union, throughout the continent, is also often described as taking a populist form. The term populism is generally understood to refer to any ideology that pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous outsiders who, wrapped together, are seen as depriving the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice. Populism is considered the opposite of paternalism, whereby bureaucratic elites know best when it comes to making important decisions and forming social policy. Superficially at least, there appears to be striking evidence of a new populism. In the Nordic countries, populist anti-immigration rhetoric is challenging and unravelling traditional politics. The success of the True Finns party in April this year follows the electoral success of the right-wing Swedish Democrats last September. In Denmark, the Danish People’s Party is considered influential and respectable enough to set the agenda on immigration, while Hungarian far-right organisation Jobbik achieved surprising success in the 2009 European Elections and is now the third largest party in Hungary. Elsewhere, support for newly emerging right-wing outfits in Holland, Austria and Italy all suggest the populist moment has arrived. Popular anxieties about Muslim immigration in particular, leading to bans on burqas or minarets in some parts of Europe, appear to fit the same pattern.

Europeans certainly have a lot to be disgruntled about. The economic crisis shows no sign of abating and European leaders appear rudderless and remote to the concerns of ordinary people. Indeed, it’s this officious contempt for the masses that some believe is fuelling the current wave of anti-elitism. Rather than forcing Brussels to democratise European politics, however, such developments only confirm elite suspicions that democracy goes hand-in-hand with demagogy and the ‘unpredictability’ of the masses. Some suggest the threat of populism is exaggerated, and that scaremongering stories about the rise of the far right are a panic response by elites fearful for their dwindling legitimacy, but might anti-democratic measures to contain the perceived problem make the populist backlash a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Should we be concerned about xenophobic parties and charismatic individuals gaining support? Or should we see the new anti-elitism as a positive response to the exhaustion and discrediting of the old political arrangements ? Have left and right been replaced by populists and paternalists? Is populism the revenge of politics or the triumph of reaction? Is populism the new spectre haunting Europe?