Anti-Elite Votes in Europe Prove Populism’s Potency Once More

D onald Trump’s electoral annihilation of Nikki Haley shows yet again that populism remains a potent force. And recent votes in Ireland and Portugal continue to show that the trend is global.

Ireland might seem to be an odd place for a populist uprising. It has swung sharply to the cultural left in recent years, approving same-sex marriage and legalizing first-trimester abortion by overwhelming margins. Yet even here the voters will put up with only so much social progressivism, as last weekend’s vote decisively rejecting two referenda demonstrated.

The two votes were over whether to change the Irish constitution to remove language stating that marriage was the basis of family, and that mothers and women have a special duty to the family and to care of family members. The Irish elite considered these references to be sexist and gendered and thought they would easily gain assent to “updating” the constitution. The Irish themselves had other ideas. Sixty-eight percent rejected the measure changing the status of marriage, and 73 percent rejected the one removing references to mothers and women.

As in other such fights, secular and university-educated Irish voters were much likelier to back the progressive measures. The three electoral constituencies where the marriage measure received the strongest backing were also ones where roughly half of residents have university degrees, and where religious “nones” make up a much higher percentage of the population than in Ireland as a whole.

The results in lower-middle-class, left-leaning areas were especially notable. Dublin Mid-West, for example, is represented by three left-wing members in the Dail, Ireland’s dominant lower parliamentary chamber. It mirrors the country in terms of its religious and economic measures, and it backed the abortion-rights referendum with 73 percent of the vote in 2018. But it cast 71 percent of its votes against the marriage and family measures. Its profile — left-leaning on economics, center to center-right on culture — is exactly that of the blue-collar voters flocking to Trump and populists elsewhere.

Portuguese voters made a similar gesture in Sunday’s parliamentary vote. The country has long been dominated by two parties, the center-left Socialists and the center-right Social Democrats. A snap election was called after the second major corruption investigation in a year ensnared the Socialist prime minister’s chief of staff, forcing his resignation. Not surprisingly, Portuguese turned away from the party in droves, giving it less than 29 percent of the vote, down roughly a third from the nearly 42 percent it garnered in 2022.

One might think that the Social Democrats could take advantage of their rivals’ turmoil. But despite running in alliance with two smaller right-wing parties, the Social Democrats lost vote share compared with their combined performance in 2022. The classically liberal party to their right, the Liberal Initiative, also failed to gain significantly in the wake of the Socialist collapse. The winner instead was a party the Socialists, Liberals, and Social Democrats could all agree was beyond the pale: the conservative-populist Chega.

Chega nearly tripled its vote share, from 7 to over 18 percent. This allowed it to quadruple its number of parliamentary seats, from twelve to 48. Voters apparently thought that only a new party — Chega was founded in 2019 — that has never governed could be trusted to take on corruption and the seemingly entrenched economic issues the country faces.

Chega proved popular in areas that have been traditional strongholds of the far left. Portugal’s rural south has long been dominated by either the Socialists or two groups to its left, the Left Bloc and the Communist-dominated Unitary Democratic Coalition. In the 2015 election, the latter two groups won twelve of the region’s 44 seats, with the Socialists winning a further 17. These six were Chega’s best regions by vote share on Sunday, earning it 13 seats. The far left dropped to only two seats, running behind Chega in every one of the region’s districts.

These areas are also among Portugal’s least-educated. Fewer than 19 percent of people over 15 in the Faro district have university degrees (“Ensino superior”), while fewer than 16 percent are university-educated in the other five. On the other hand, the city with the nation’s highest share of university graduates — Oeiras, in the Lisbon district — gave Chega only 11 percent of the vote compared with a combined 41 percent for the Social Democrats and the Liberal Initiative.

These trends mirror those found in the United States and elsewhere in the past decade. People with college degrees tend to favor traditional conservatives over populists and are leaning leftward when populism is in the ascendancy. But those without college degrees find populism highly attractive, are repelled by the progressive Left’s cultural overreach, and find little to like in warmed-over 1980s-style conservatism.

The lesson is clear: A populism that doesn’t attract the traditional Right cannot become a majority, but a traditionalism that echoes populist concerns can poach working-class votes from the Left by the bushel.