It has been a hard decade for optimists.
In nearly every European capital, pundits have grown used to speaking about “the populist wave” as though it were a permanent feature of the political weather: something that cannot be avoided, just endured, like rain in Amsterdam or drizzle in Galway.
Far-right populists, we were told, had decoded the DNA of modern resentment: immigration, elites, culture wars, Brussels. Liberals flailed; social democrats vanished into consultancy firms. The people, apparently, had gone feral.
But every so often, the weather breaks.
In these very different democracies on the damp edge of the continent, candidates who addressed voters’ material concerns, rather than their cultural fears, won resounding victories.
The centrist-liberal D66 party scored a surprise triumph in the Netherlands over Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). And in Ireland, Catherine Connolly, a left-wing independent whose campaign was built around housing, cost of living, and social justice, won the presidency in a landslide.
Neither outcome signals a revolutionary turn. But together they underscore the fragility of populist power.
When confronted by credible figures who speak to the everyday insecurities of working-and middle-class voters without resorting to scapegoats or nostalgia, far-right populism proves surprisingly brittle.
For years, the Netherlands was a petri dish for Europe’s populist far right. Geert Wilders perfected the genre long before Donald Trump or Brexit. Bleached hair, anti-Islam tirades, a permanent scowl: he was the prototype for the cultural entrepreneur of grievance. In 2023, Wilders’s PVV stunned Europeans by becoming the largest party in parliament. Commentators proclaimed the “Dutch Trump moment.”
Two years later, that triumph has evaporated. The October 2025 election ended in humiliation for Wilders: PVV’s seat total fell sharply, while the centrist-liberal Democrats 66 (D66) surged to first place. Sigrid Kaag, D66’s leader, campaigned on a simple, upbeat slogan—Het kan wel (“It can be done”). Instead of fear or fury, she offered competence, stability, and a dash of optimism.
This was not the rhetoric that typically stirs Dutch hearts. Yet it worked. According to exit polling, many voters who had flirted with Wilders’ populism in protest returned to the political mainstream. His coalition partners bickered, his anti-EU posturing alarmed business, and his party’s lack of credible policy on housing and wages became impossible to ignore.
In a country where rents have soared and affordable homes have vanished, Wilders’s obsession with cultural grievances suddenly looked like a luxury.
To be clear, the Dutch right did not collapse. The overall vote for conservative and populist parties remains high; newer outfits like JA21 picked up some of Wilders’s defectors. But the PVV’s defeat exposed the limits of the populist formula.
It turns out that even the angriest voters want more than anger. When a credible centrist speaks to their material frustrations—however timidly—they listen.
Wilders’s problem is the same one facing populists across Europe: he promised both revenge on elites and relief for ordinary people, but could deliver neither. The Dutch economy remains entangled with the European Union, and Wilders’s vow to cut immigration clashed with the country’s dependence on migrant labour. His theatrics, once cathartic, now seem tired. Shouting about Muslims will not yield affordable apartments.
In other words, the people are still angry, but not necessarily at the same villains.
If the Dutch election was a rebuke for the far right, Ireland’s presidential race represented a gentle insurrection from the left. Catherine Connolly, a Galway independent long known for her advocacy on housing and Palestine, entered the 2025 contest as a long shot against the establishment parties Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. She ended it with 63 per cent of first-preference votes, the largest margin in the history of the office.
Ireland’s presidency is mostly ceremonial. The job comes with an elegant house, a lot of ribbon-cutting, and the faint hope of moral authority. Yet Connolly’s campaign struck a nerve.
The Irish housing crisis, now well into its second decade, has left an entire generation locked out of ownership. Rents in Dublin rival those of London. Homelessness has soared. Meanwhile, successive governments—alternating between the two centre-right parties—have treated the crisis as an unfortunate side effect of success.
Connolly spoke the forbidden words: class, redistribution, public housing. She paired that message with a forthright defence of neutrality in foreign policy and a call for solidarity with Gaza, positions that resonated with younger voters and the Irish left.
Her victory, though symbolic, matters. It demonstrates that Irish voters are not as conservative as their party system suggests. Their votes punctured the complacency of the establishment. The supposedly “moderate” centre had long imagined that any challenge to its hegemony must come from the nationalist right. Instead, the challenge came from a pragmatic, compassionate left—one that treated economic security and social justice as inseparable.
Even the low turnout—just under 46 per cent—tells a story. Many citizens have tuned out of a political system that feels unresponsive. Connolly’s landslide, achieved despite that apathy, suggests a hunger for alternatives that Ireland’s traditional parties no longer supply.
What unites the Dutch and Irish results is not ideology but structure. In both cases, political systems long paralysed by the dialectic of technocracy and populism briefly opened to a less dysfunctional possibility. The standard script—angry outsiders versus managerial insiders—was interrupted by candidates who, however cautiously, offered to speak about the real economy of ordinary life.
Far-right populism thrives when voters perceive no meaningful distinction between the centre-left and centre-right, when politics collapses into a contest of tone rather than substance. Wilders’s fortunes rose in response to that vacuum. He communicated the sense that the elites—left, right, or green—would all manage decline in roughly the same way. Likewise, the Irish establishment’s alternating duopoly created the illusion of choice without alternatives.
Both Kaag and Connolly broke that spell, albeit from different directions. Kaag re-centred the conversation on competence and pragmatic reform; Connolly reframed it around distribution and dignity. In each case, they implicitly acknowledged what populists understand instinctively: politics is about people’s material lives, not just the GDP or the moral performance of “values”.
This is not a new insight. Antonio Gramsci wrote a century ago that hegemony is sustained not by force but by consent, the slow accumulation of everyday credibility. Populists accumulate that credibility through grievance; neoliberals through inevitability. Both depend on passivity.
What the Dutch and Irish election results hint at is the possibility of a different hegemony, one grounded in the promise of material security and democratic competence.
The fragility of populism, then, is not a moral failing but a structural one. Far-right populists rarely govern well because their coalitions are contradictory. They unite the disaffected poor with the resentful middle class under a flag of cultural homogeneity. But such coalitions collapse when confronted with the arithmetic of policy. Tax cuts for the middle and welfare for the poor cannot coexist indefinitely. When material crises—housing, wages, inflation—take centre stage, the contradictions become visible.
In the Netherlands, D66’s message of stability and modest reform gave middle-class voters an exit from the populist cul-de-sac. In Ireland, Connolly offered working-class voters an alternative to cynical resignation. Both victories show that far-right populism’s base is less a stable bloc than a temporary alliance of the anxious. The moment another actor credibly channels that anxiety into hope, that alliance may fracture.
Still, these are fragile openings. Kaag’s D66 remains a centrist, pro-market party. Its instincts lean toward managerialism. And Connolly’s presidency, though symbolically powerful, wields little executive authority.
Without structural change—redistributive policy, social housing, renewed labour power—the material grievances that fuel populism will persist, waiting for the next demagogue to exploit them.
The temptation for Europe’s centre is to interpret these results as a vindication of moderation. That would be a mistake. The lesson of both elections is not that “the centre holds”, but that the centre can win if it addresses real economic pain.
The Dutch voter did not fall in love with neoliberalism; they merely chose competence over chaos. The Irish voter did not become a socialist overnight; they recognised their own plight in Connolly’s insistence that housing is a right, not a commodity.
If anything, these elections confirm that technocratic governance without redistribution remains vulnerable. The defeat of far-right populists will last only as long as rents stop rising and bills stop climbing. Once the material basis of hope erodes, the old resentments will return, perhaps in a sharper form.
There is a faint echo here of the post-war social democratic compromise—the idea that material security is the precondition for liberal democracy. The architects of that compromise understood that inequality breeds demagoguery. Europe dismantled much of it in the 1990s, then wondered why the far right blossomed in its ruins.
Rebuilding such a compromise today will not be easy. It requires more than rhetorical empathy. The economy must be re-embedded in society, restoring what Karl Polanyi called the “double movement” of social protection against market excess. Populists claim to defend the people against elites; technocrats claim to defend reality against fantasy. Neither defends the conditions of everyday life.
If these elections are tremors, not earthquakes, what can they tell us?
First, populism’s grip is not inevitable. It depends on monopoly—on being the only voice that acknowledges pain. Once that monopoly breaks, populists struggle. The Dutch and Irish results remind us that addressing material needs, even in cautious or symbolic ways, can disrupt that monopoly.
Second, the path forward for progressive politics lies neither in moral grandstanding nor in managerial fatalism, but in the reconstruction of credible solidarity. Populism thrives on isolation—on the sense that nobody else shares your predicament. A politics that rebuilds public institutions, social housing, and universal services also rebuilds community.
Third, the struggle is less electoral than infrastructural. The left cannot rely on occasional insurgent victories or charismatic candidates. It must construct what Gramsci called a “counter-hegemony”: a new common sense that binds the middle and lower strata through tangible improvements in life chances. That project remains embryonic, but Kaag and Connolly’s victories hint that the appetite exists.
Finally, we should resist triumphalism. Populism is resilient because it expresses something real: a profound alienation from systems that promise participation but deliver precarity. Defeating populism is not a matter of silencing that alienation, but of resolving it, by making democracy once again capable of improving material life.
It is tempting to treat the Dutch and Irish elections as isolated curiosities—quirks of small countries at the fringe of Europe. Yet they may prefigure a broader recalibration.
Across the continent, far-right populists face an overreach problem. Having tasted power, its contradictions are becoming visible: the alliance between libertarian business elites and nostalgia for the welfare state, between anti-globalist rhetoric and global supply chains, between promises of sovereignty and the realities of economic interdependence.
Meanwhile, the post-neoliberal centre is groping toward a new language. In France, President Emmanuel Macron flirts with dirigisme; in Germany, even Christian Democrats speak of “industrial policy”. The pandemic and the energy crisis opened the door to state intervention. What remains missing is the moral confidence to make redistribution a virtue rather than a concession.
Ireland and the Netherlands, in their modest ways, hint at what such confidence might look like: neither radicalism for its own sake, nor the technocrat’s condescension. Rather, it inheres in the conviction that it is possible to govern competently and to care about how people live. That combination, unglamorous as it sounds, may be the true antidote to populism.
Politics, like weather, remains unpredictable. In the autumn of 2025, two small democracies offered proof that the storm of populism can pass.
In Amsterdam, voters chose a politics of calm over a politics of vengeance. In Galway, they chose empathy over cynicism. Neither victory transforms the structure of capitalism nor ends austerity. Both remind us that hegemony is never permanent.
The task now is to turn these flickering glimpses of a post-populist Europe into a roaring fire.
It is crucial to build parties and movements capable of sustaining material hope beyond a single election cycle.
That means focusing on housing, wages, public services: boring things, perhaps, but also the ones that make life possible. It means treating democracy not as a brand but as a shared infrastructure.
Photograph courtesy of Roel Wijnants. Published under a Creative Commons license.
