I write this Debrief after the success of Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic in October 2025. The former leader from 2017 to 2021, he’s a billionaire who sells red baseball caps with white text: in 2025, he returns with a vengeance and a stronger mandate than his previous election… does this sound at all familiar?
Yes, Babiš marketed himself as the nation’s Trump and won big (it wasn’t at all a surprise). He won’t have enough seats to govern alone – his ANO 2011 party won 80 seats with 101 needed for a majority – but with the further right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party and anti-environmentalists Motorists for Themselves (cleverly shortened to AUTO), he’ll get over the line.
Babiš joins a few other Central European populist leaders who have been elected in the past few years. Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s freshly elected president, would be more than happy to have another ally in Central Europe. Robert Fico in Slovakia, though nominally a left-winger, would be happy to have another populist Visegrád ally. Victor Orbán, although polls suggest he may be looking for the exit door next year, has already welcomed Babiš’ victory. The FPÖ, leading the polls in Austria, to the south-west of these four, will be emboldened by a hard-right resurgence to its north.
The Visegrád Four came to be known during the migrant crisis in the mid-2010s. Four Central European countries with conservative-leaning leaders – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland – clubbed together to stand against the EU’s distribution of migrants to its territories. This decade, the group has been split due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Fico and Orbán blocking EU action against Putin, and by now liberal Czech and Polish leaders quite firmly in favour. There could be hopes – aside from Poland, where there is a strong disconnect between the President and Prime Minister’s ideologies – that the Visegrád Four could now be more strongly united.
Has the 2020s populist boom gone bust?
Even before Trump’s return to the White House, there had been some clear signals of a populist wave across Europe. Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy in 2022 seemed to have been the first concrete indication of Europe’s firm right-wing direction. This was followed by Sweden and Finland voting for a right-wing alliance in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Spain shocked pollsters by dramatically avoiding the same fate. Last year, Austria placed FPÖ top, yet they didn’t quite have enough seats to form a government.
Two or three years later, though, governments with hard-right components appear to be struggling. Sweden and Finland are grappling with a youth unemployment crisis, which has made the far-right Perussuomalaiset’s polling, boosted by young voters in the early part of this decade, collapse. Meanwhile, the governing left in Spain has taken credit for a surprise economic boom, with inconclusive polling making any general election result a coin toss.
One curious election result this year came from Norway, where the left, dogged by years of poor polling, pulled off a miraculous comeback and saw off a hard-right challenge boosted by younger voters. Iceland also bucked the trend in its election last year, flipping from the right wing to the left. The first strong signal of Europe’s shift in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, is still leading opinion polls but has a strong 62% disapproval rating: voters are disquiet about the rising cost of living.
These three may be the exceptions that prove the rule. Any stoop to populism is due to voters wanting any vaguely reasonable alternative, compared to a cult-like thrill of MAGA that gave Trump a successful base from which to spring back to the White House.
Could mainstream parties return to strength?
That’s the million-pound question, and it’s one that only they can answer. Meloni in Italy is profiting from a disunited opposition. The opposite is happening in Spain: Pedro Sánchez plucked victory from the jaws of defeat in 2023, once voters for the mainstream conservative party wavered about its ability to work with the far-right. Polling for the next election remains too close to call.
A notable case from outside of Europe is Argentina’s Javier Milei. In 2024, he had been lauded by Elon Musk and Donald Trump for his chainsaw-running, free-wheeling cost-cutting agenda, which lit a way for his country out of hyperinflation. Now, once-optimistic investors have been unnerved by corruption scandals involving Milei’s family, as well as having to take an unpopular bailout from Donald Trump. That appears to be translating into support for the Peronist opposition party that Milei rallied against in his successful election campaign.
The post-Trump wave that seems to have galvanised Central Europe should not denigrate the success of anti-Trumpism candidates in the Anglosphere. Anthony Albanese in Australia and Mark Carney in Canada both turned around disastrous poll ratings this year by presenting themselves to voters on their parties’ natural left as sensible, anti-Donald options who could steady the ship. Both were helped, no doubt, by questionable opposition campaigns.
Around the world, more liberal candidates have managed to defeat a trend for right-wing candidates since Trump’s election. The incumbent left-wing’s comeback in Norway was helped by the surprise return of popular former PM and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg as Finance Minister, key to a working relationship with the US. Romania’s liberal Nicuşor Dan won the calamitous 2025 elections, which had earlier indicated a shift to the hard right under Călin Georgescu. Trump’s defence of Jair Bolsonáro and high retaliatory tariffs on Brazil has pulled unimpressed voters to President Lula, who had previously faced a damaging loss of support.
Janan Ganesh wrote this week in the Financial Times that he is “not sure how the idea has taken hold that populists profit from a crisis”, proposing that economic strength allows electorates to take a punt on a self-styled disruptor of the traditional order. But Trump’s election in 2024 was partly from Americans feeling economically worse off than four years before, even if Biden’s economy was performing very well. While he notes that the vote for Brexit was taken when the economy had expanded year on year, Prof. Nicholas Crafts, writing for the CEPR think tank, proposed an alternative timeline: that the Tories’ austerity programme, taken as a response to the 2008 crisis, turned voters to UKIP, in turn panicking David Cameron into holding the referendum.
If we go for the second timeline, then perhaps the pan-European energy crisis in the early part of this decade, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, may have tilted Europe to nationalistic forces. Even in America, Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs resulted in a rise in his disapproval rating at home and turned Europe away from the USA.
In an uncertain world, there may be a place for the traditional order to steady the ship as populists in government find their heady promises unworkable. Mainstream parties just have to find it.
York Global Affairs 