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This chapter analyzes the electoral successes of anti-system forces, looking at how differences in the social, economic, and political institutions in rich democracies determine the extent and nature of anti-system support. Anti-system politics is stronger in countries that are structurally prone to run trade deficits, have weak or badly designed welfare states, and have electoral rules that artificially suppress the range of political options voters can choose from. The chapter also shows that the ways in which welfare systems distribute exposure to economic risks predict whether anti-system politics takes a predominantly left-wing or right-wing direction. Right-wing anti-system politics is successful in creditor countries with very inclusive welfare states. Meanwhile, left-wing anti-system politics is stronger in debtor countries with “dualistic” welfare states.

This introductory chapter provides a background of anti-system politics. The term “anti-system” was coined by political scientist Giovanni Sartori in the 1960s to describe political parties that articulated opposition to the liberal democratic political order in Western democracies. The reasons for the rise in anti-system politics are structural, and have been a long time brewing. The success of anti-system parties forces us to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the political and economic system, and the way in which the twenty-first-century market economy affects people’s lives. Rather than dismissing anti-system politics as “populism,” driven by racial hatred, nebulous foreign conspiracies, or an irrational belief in “fake news,” people need to start by understanding what has gone wrong in the rich democracies to alienate so many citizens from those who govern them.

This chapter examines the evolution of anti-system politics in Italy. The Italian case has all the familiar ingredients of an anti-system revolt: a severe economic crisis, high levels of inequality, and an unresponsive and discredited political system. However, the form anti-system politics took differed from the rest of the South in intriguing ways. Italy differed from Greece, Spain, and Portugal in lacking a strong anti-austerity movement that could have acted as a focal point for a left alternative. The other exception of the Italian case is the strength of the anti-system Right. Italy experienced a sharp rise in migration, as well as having to manage the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. Migration may have mobilized some voters, but the failings of the established parties to address a serious economic crisis offers a powerful explanation of the collapse of Italy’s party system, just as it did in the early 1990s.

This chapter discusses the evolution of anti-system politics in Spain. Spain provides an eloquent illustration of the direct impact of economic distress on anti-system politics. The country suffered one of the deepest financial crises and most severe hits to the wealth and incomes of large numbers of people. This was followed by a surge of political instability, voter volatility, and electoral shifts away from the establishment parties to anti-system forces. The political discourses of the anti-system parties, and the kinds of voters they appealed to, confirm that economic factors were the driving force behind this transformation. However, Spain also reveals the complexity of anti-system politics, with anti-austerity politics contributing to the intensification of the conflict between Catalan nationalism and its opponents, both within Catalonia and across the rest of Spain.

This chapter assesses the Eurozone debt crisis as a conflict between creditor and debtor countries, pitting northern member states against the southern periphery, before looking at the distributional politics of austerity in the smaller southern Eurozone states of Greece and Portugal. The Eurozone crisis placed the European Union under extraordinary strain, as markets panicked, leaving the weaker and more indebted member states struggling to avoid financial collapse. The bailouts of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal may have saved them from crashing out of the single currency, but the price was harsh austerity for their citizens and an accumulation of debt comparable to wartime. Meanwhile, the political costs of the euro crisis can be seen in the destabilization of European party systems. Not only did Greece embrace anti-system politics, electing a government opposed to the bailout regime, but the northern European countries that had put up much of the money for the rescues also saw their own political backlash.

This chapter traces the response to inequality and financial collapse in the United Kingdom, with the anti-system Right represented by the Brexit campaign, and the Left by Jeremy Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour Party. Like Trump’s election in the United States, which it preceded by less than six months, the Brexit vote was an anti-system vote, a vote of rejection of the existing political establishment and the economic policies it had implemented since the 1980s. Just as Trump’s victory mobilized entrenched racial divides in the United States, Brexit reflected a long-standing skepticism about European integration in British society. The chapter then argues that Brexit formed part of a wider anti-system revolt in Britain, which replaced the centrist politics of the 1990s and 2000s with a deeply polarized politics pitting half the country against the other.

This concluding chapter addresses the implications of anti-system politics for the future of capitalism and democracy in the advanced countries. It argues that the current wave of anti-system support reflects the ultimate failure of the project of “market liberalism,” in that the limitations of the market logic have been laid bare by the financial crisis and the inability of the free market model to deliver prosperity and security. The answer to this crisis is likely to involve a reassertion of political authority over the market: either a revival of social democracy, the guiding ideology of the inclusive capitalism of the second half of the twentieth century, or a return to the nationalism and mercantilism of the interwar period.

This chapter argues that the 2016 election in the United States is best understood in terms of the long-run consequences of the neoliberal turn in the 1970s, and the way in which the financial crisis of the late 2000s was addressed. In 2016 the electorate of the United States delivered probably the biggest political shock in their modern history, electing the unlikely figure of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s rise is deeply intertwined with the financial crisis and with the longer-term political shifts resulting from the market liberal turn of the 1980s. If Trump is the most spectacular example of anti-system politics, the United States is the most extreme case of the subjection of society to the brute force of the market. The destabilization of US politics shows how an obsessive drive for marketization, high levels of income inequality, an unstable financial system, and constraints on political choice provoke political revolt.