Populists are winning. Here’s how we beat them.

By Liam Byrne, MP

Populists are winning. By some reckoning, they govern a quarter of the world’s democracies. Across America, Europe and beyond, mainstream politics is losing ground to movements that offer simple answers to complex grievances.

Yet, this may not be peak populism. It may be populism’s tipping point, because the three deep forces driving the populist surge may all get stronger in the years to come:

• The great disillusion with democracy’s broken economic promise may deepen. In the decade to 2025, free democracies grew (at just 2.5% a year), more slowly than dictatorships. Since the Great Financial Crisis, wages in major OECD economies have advanced a mere 0.6% a year - down from 1.7% before the financial crisis. At that pace, it takes wages over a century to double. And as Third Way has argued, the costs of the five tickets to middle-class life—home ownership, childcare, college, healthcare, retirement—have outrun pay for a generation. If AI hurts 65% of jobs (as the IMF predicts), the pressure may just get worse.

• The great division in our societies may deepen: the collapse of social capital so well documented by Robert Putnam and others, has been turbo-charged by social media. Platforms built to monetize attention have been engineered to reward outrage above all else. Yet without proper regulation, this digital division may simply accelerate

• The new age of human movement may accelerate. As the World Bank points out, 1.2 billion young people will join the labor market in the next 10-15 years. On current trajectories, these economies are expected to generate only about 400 million jobs over that same period—leaving a gap of staggering proportions. In search of hope, hundreds of millions may leave their homes in search of work abroad.

So this may not be peak populism. It could be populism’s tipping point. Progressives must study what they are up against — and fight back with equal force.

One way to understand what progressives are fighting is to study the populist argument itself. Semantic analysis of speeches by Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Meloni and Orbán is revealing. Beneath the different accents, it appears they all play the same three chords.

1. National renewal: incantations of greatness, collective rebirth, a glorious future to be seized, juxtaposed to an age-old story about ethno-civilizational decline that we can trace back through Pat Buchanan to the French Nouvelle Droite of the 1960’s, to the German historian Oswald Spenger’s Decline of the West published in the 1920’s.

2. Nostalgic conservatism: the weaponization of time, the idealized past, the promise of restoration, ‘take back’ and ‘get back’ as political commands.

3. ‘The Emergency’: the crisis requiring a strong man, a decisive leader willing to cut through democratic niceties to save the nation from its enemies.

Three chords: pride, nostalgia, and the summons to a strong man. Different tunes, same refrain.

Three Ideas for the Progressive Fightback

So how do progressives fight back? Three ideas are critical.

1. Our own story of national renewal: De-rigging the marketplace and restoring the power to make progress

Progressives must stop conceding the language of renewal to ethno-nationalist nostalgia and start fighting for it on honest ground. National renewal means restoring both “the freedom to be you” with the power to make progress, and that requires de-rigging a marketplace now dominated by vested interests.

This requires not a sui generis assault on capitalism as some would counsel, but precision strikes against the Selfish Minority—those who deny workers a fair wage, gouge consumers on prices, squeeze small suppliers and offshore profits while demanding public subsidy. After all, “fair wage” and “fair price” have been the cornerstones of ethical economics since Aristotle.

Franklin Roosevelt named his enemies plainly; business and financial monopoly, reckless banking, and war profiteering, and built a majority around taking them on. The line of solidarity runs between those who play by the rules and those who rig them, not between communities defined by identity.

2. Optimism: Rebuilding the opportunity economy from its dynamic roots

The populist’s second chord is nostalgia, which is both an appeal to the deep-coded wisdom of the past plus a genuine sadness at how a local community has changed from our childhoods.

The progressive answer is not to match it with false hope—neither the economics of restoring lost factory towns of past (what I call nostronomics), nor the inflationary over-reach of Bidenomics. It is fine to celebrate our history and restore our heritage as a beacon of pride in the past. But we cannot live in our yesterdays.

Our economics must be something harder and more durable: a plausible optimism about what a well-governed free economy can deliver.

That means rebuilding the opportunity economy from its dynamic roots—small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers, the self-made and the risk-takers who are the engine of renewal in any genuinely free market. It means making the concrete, felt case that the gains of the next decade—from technology, from the green transition, from a reformed trading order—can be broadly shared. Optimism earned by delivery, not declared by press release.

3. Strength: Built on a strong society, not a strongman

The populist cult of the strong man—decisive, rule-breaking, cutting through the bureaucratic fog—is seductive precisely because institutions feel broken and politics feels captured.

Yet strongman leaders all too often trade on the politics of division and rule in ways that weaken a nation against its adversaries. That is precisely why the Russian intelligence service so actively fund efforts that divide. The progressive answer is not to mimic that offer but to make the democratic case for a different kind of strength: strength built on a strong society, bound by civic reciprocity and capable of collective action. A politics where we’re all in this together—not as a hollow slogan, but an organizing principle that draws the lines of solidarity around those who work, pay taxes and play by the rules, and takes on those who don’t. Strong governance that is accountable, not capricious.

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The model to emulate is Franklin Roosevelt. When FDR took office in 1933, democratic capitalism had failed catastrophically, authoritarian movements were marching across Europe and a quarter of Americans were unemployed. He did not move to the centre, split the difference or wait for the storm to pass. He named the enemies of ordinary people, built a new majority coalition, and proved—through visible, felt delivery—that democratic government could actually work.

FDR understood that the battle against despair could not be won with speeches alone. It had to be fought with pay packets, on farms and high streets, in homes. His words still light the path: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The only thing that can defeat us is the belief that we cannot win.

The populists have told their story with clarity and force. It is time for progressives to tell ours—with equal courage, and far greater honesty about what it will take to deliver.

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Liam Byrne, MP, was a finance minister in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet and is Chairman of the House of Commons Business & Trade Committee. His book, Why Populists Are Winning — And How to Beat Them, was published by Head of Zeus, on 26 March 2026.