Populism runs up against electoral reality

Last week was not a great one for nativist populism. Coming off the high of Brexit and Trump, fellow travellers across the globe have been angling for their own successes, but these are proving elusive. In two distinct disappointments, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom, or PVV, polled poorly in the Dutch general election, and the high-profile intervention of Pauline Hanson and One Nation in Western Australian politics proved something of an own goal. Taken together, these failures help illustrate the limitations of populism as an electoral platform.