Why is populism, broadly defined, on the brink of historic victories around the world, while populism in the form of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party is poised to lose one or both houses of Congress in the United States?
The troubles Trump’s Republicans face are not a mystery. It was always unlikely that Republicans would maintain their hair’s-breadth House majority.
But the 2026 lineup of Senate seats looked favorable, with only one Republican defending a seat in a state Kamala Harris carried and all but one defending seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. At least two Democrats were defending seats in states Trump carried in 2024, and retirements opened up two other seats in marginal states.
That picture has now changed. Persistent inflation, some of it plausibly triggered by Trump’s tariffs, has hurt Republicans. Democrats have sprinted to big polling leads in Georgia and North Carolina, and various combinations of weak Republicans and strong Democrats have left Republicans trailing in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas — states Trump carried by double digits two years ago.
Democrats are already planning investigations of Trump’s financial shenanigans and drafting articles of impeachment. They have high hopes of a 2028 trifecta: the House, Senate, and presidency. Republicans’ trifecta hopes are clouded by the prospect of primaries pitting Trump supporters against his opponents.
What a different picture in the rest of the world. Populist veteran Marine Le Pen is the front-runner for president of France next year, while next month’s snap election in Spain is likely to put the populist Vox party into a governing coalition.
Germany’s populist AfD just won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, and it’s getting hard to imagine how the traditional parties can keep excluding it from federal coalitions. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, with roots in a populist party that had been excluded from power for years, heads the longest-serving government in post-World War II Italy.
Britain’s populist Reform UK party has lost its lead in public polls after the Labour government ditched Keir Starmer and installed Andy Burnham as prime minister. But it’s interesting that Labour, founded in 1900, felt obliged to reach beyond the usual parliamentary leadership ranks to select first a professional barrister and then a regional mayor. Reform UK, founded in 2018, is still polling ahead of the Conservatives, whose roots go back to 1846.
The picture is even starker in the Western Hemisphere. In November 2023, free-market booster Javier Milei defeated the Peronist candidate in Argentina after attacking high inflation and bloated bureaucracy. In the 15 months beginning in April 2025, conservative populists defeated leftist candidates in Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Colombia.
In the first round of elections this past Sunday in Brazil, Flavio Bolsonaro led incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 47% to 45%. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, now confined to house arrest, was elected in 2018 and lost in 2022 to Lula, as he is usually called, by 51% to 49%. Lula was previously elected in 2002 and 2006, and his Workers’ Party has won five of the last six presidential elections. He was leading in preelection polls, but Flavio Bolsonaro is considered likely, though not certain, to win the Oct. 25 runoff.
What accounts for the populist wave? In Europe, many voters have recoiled against high levels of immigration, especially of young Muslim men, amid worries that they are not assimilating economically or culturally. Bloated government payrolls and high rates of violent crime are populist complaints in both Europe and South America.
The populist complaint, voiced in loud and raucous terms, is that established parties in government have not just failed to solve these problems but have refused to do so. They have cordoned off populist parties and candidates, as if opposing open borders for immigrants who are difficult to assimilate or supporting tough sentences for violent criminals were morally equivalent to Nazi or communist mass murder.
So how do we explain why populism is on the rise beyond the U.S., even as it seems mired in failure here?
One explanation is that Trumpism is not really mired in failure. Donald Trump has been president of the U.S. for almost six of the last 10 years and has had substantial policy successes. They range from economic growth exceeding that of other major countries to the recent treaty promising American control of Greenland.
That success is part of his problem. After three and a half years of the Biden administration arguing that the law left it no alternative to an open-door immigration policy, the second Trump administration has proved that the border can be controlled.
This success signals to a future administration that it will pay a steep price if it returns to open borders. But for the moment, voters no longer need a Trumpist to close the border. It’s been done.
And, given the messiness of everyday life, it’s been done with some collateral damage to the populist cause. Consider the heavy-handed ICE raids in Minneapolis choreographed by the oddball Homeland Security appointee Kristi Noem and her consigliere, Corey Lewandowski.
There is something in the nature of populist politics — the willingness to take on and persevere against established media, corporate, academic, and party elites — that produces a peculiarly personal kind of leadership. Success in ignoring hoary shibboleths only encourages such leaders to defy warnings they would be better off heeding.
Populist politics has given us the family dramas of the Trumps in America, the Le Pens in France, and the Bolsonaros in Brazil. It has given America a president who threatens the sovereignty of friendly or largely unoffending allies such as Canada and Denmark.
It has saddled the Republican Party with inflation imposed by tariffs for which there is no perceptible demand from even the smallest subgroup of the electorate. Yet Trump supplies them in abundance, driven by idiosyncratic theories he concocted in the 1980s.
The president’s party has suffered as well from his choice of suboptimal Republican nominees, which has already cost Republicans several Senate seats and seems on the verge of, amazingly, costing them a Senate seat in Texas as well. A leader who has gotten where he is by defying conventional wisdom that proves wrong gets into the habit of defying it even when, as on many occasions, it is absolutely right.
From time to time, we hear predictions from politicians, both populist and conventional, that their side will govern for the next generation. That seldom happens. The Democratic Party won House majorities in every election from 1954 through 1992. But Republicans held the presidency for 26 of those 40 years, and Democrats were usually split between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals.
In the 32 years since 1994, presidential elections have produced party trifectas — majorities in both houses of Congress and control of the presidency — in six of eight election years. But only once did a trifecta last as long as four years, and in one case, it ended after five months. Populist movements can achieve worthy goals spurned by more conventional forces. But they are subject to the rules that every person’s strength is also his weakness and that, in human affairs, success tends to breed failure.