Another blow for populism?

It happened again last week, in another major advanced democracy. People power had lumped a mainstream political party with an unelectable vote-repellent leader/candidate, but the polls had narrowed as the election campaign progressed, guffawing had given way to bewilderment, and it turned out that the political kryptonite was not so poisonous after all. Republican candidate Donald Trump lost the national vote by just 2.1 per cent last November. Last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party came up only 2.4 per cent short in Britain. Drawing parallels between political events is often a facile exercise, but this time the comparison is apt. Both campaigns sprang, at least in part, from the same source: what’s commonly called “populism.”