The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.

When all votes had been counted, the Right-wing alliance, which had hoped to use a shock victory to force fresh national elections, finished more than seven points behind the Left. It wasn’t even close.

For much of the past three years Salvini has seemed unstoppable. While the 46-year-old has at times miscalculated, like last summer when he tried and failed to bring down Italy’s shaky government, he has developed a potent message.

Strident opposition to immigration, refugees, Brussels and Rome, combined with a near-constant presence on social media, has transformed Lega from a northern separatist fringe party into a serious force that has swept southwards and into first place in the national polls.

But now Salvini has been stalled. Cue much talk about the decline of populism. “Peak Populism?” asked The Times in its leader, in the shadow of his defeat. It is not the first time this question has been asked, of course. In the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s defeat to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, many observers drew the same conclusion; populism had finally been kicked into decline. But then it continued to consolidate across much of Europe, not only at the national level but also winning a record number of seats in the European Parliament last spring.

As in 2017, many see Salvini’s defeat in Emilia-Romagna as a crucial watershed; a line in the sand in the global debate about how to defeat populism. Bruised by their defeat in the Brexit wars, and anxious about a looming rematch with Donald Trump in November, liberal campaigners are rushing to draw lessons from the regional battle, or what Italy’s La Repubblica has branded Salvini’s “first defeat”.

Some are already arguing that the main takeaway is the need for mass mobilisation. Perhaps the most striking feature of the election is that, compared to the previous contest in 2014, turnout surged by 30 points.

Then comes the more specific counter-mobilisation in the form of the ‘Sardines’ movement, which sprung up in November to oppose Salvini and the Right-wing turn in Italian politics. The Sardines, named on account of the way in which they pack themselves into town squares, are already being hailed around the world as an antidote to populism. “An Italian flash mob just pushed back Europe’s populist tide“, reads a headline in The Atlantic.

But is this really the case? There is certainly no doubt that the vibrant, youth-led movement played a role but precisely how much of a role is up for debate. Compared to the last election the Left’s share of the vote only increased by 2-points. The Right’s jumped by nearly 14-points while Salvini and Lega walked away with a new record share of the vote, as did the ultra Right Brothers of Italy who saw their support jump more than four-fold.

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Perhaps just as important, if not more so, was the collapse of the populist “neither Left nor Right” Five Star, whose leader, Luigi Di Maio, sensing the shifting winds, resigned only a few days before the election. In Emilia-Romagna support for Five Star crashed by 10-points and, crucially, much of this vote appears to have flowed over to the Left. This may yet have profound implications for Italian politics.

If Five Star continue to decline then the centre-Left may be the beneficiary as Italy becomes more polarised between Left and Right. Either way, the defection of Five Star voters to the Left arguably reflected not so much the discovery of a new liberal formula for fighting populism but more simply a governing populist party failing to manage the transition from being an outsider to an insider governing party.

Then there is the region’s long-established political tradition. Similar to Labour’s Red Wall in England and Wales, or the socialist strongholds in industrial France, Emilia-Romagna has long been dominated by the Left. In fact, for more than half a century this strong tribal loyalty and local culture made it virtually impossible for other challengers to breakthrough. This too helped the Left. But as in England, France and elsewhere, there are signs that the Left’s dominance is weakening and that national populists, rather than retreating, might actually be consolidating.

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The writing has been on the wall for a while. Salvini and Lega took 19% in this region at national elections in 2018 and then nearly 34% at the European elections last year, along the way picking up a few victories in mayoral elections. And now they have a new record share of the vote at regional elections.

It all feels so familiar to those of us who have watched the Brexit wars. Lega’s gradual chipping away at the established parties remains me of UKIP’s gradual erosion of Labour majorities, which cleared the way for a wider assault on the Red Wall in 2019. I’m not saying that Italy is going to vote to leave the European Union but I am saying that sequencing in politics is important, and that it feels incredibly unlikely that Salvini and Lega have actually peaked.

On the contrary, Salvini and his movement appear to be consolidating. This is reflected not only in its record general election result in 2018, and then its strongest ever result at European elections in 2019, but also in a string of record results at regional elections in the past two years; the Aosta Valley, Abruzzo, Basilicata, Piedmont, Lombardy, Sardinia, South Tyrol, Trentino, Fruili-Venevia Giulia and the Left stronghold of Umbria. Emilia-Romagna now joins that list.

This is the story of how parties build support; bit by bit, district by district, some prominent victories mixed with some prominent defeats. While Salvini failed to breach the wall this time it is not hard to see how he and his allies might do so in the future, much like UKIP’s defeat in the Labour Party bastion of Heywood and Middleton paved the way for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to eventually capture the seat in 2019. Salvini and his party have still led in every single poll since October 2018 and with an unstable government it seems likely that Italy will have elections sooner rather than later.

This is why I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that, contrary to the inevitable talk about the defeat of populism, Lega continues to emerge as a stable and permanent player in Italian politics. We should avoid sensationalist talk about peak populism and instead explore the deep-rooted currents that are pushing these movements forward; strong public distrust in politics and institutions; fears about the relative deprivation of one’s group compared to others in society; intense worries over both the pace and scale of immigration and social change; and the way in which our parties have been pushed into an era of ‘dealignment’, as the bonds between voters and established parties break down. None of these is going anywhere anytime soon.

In the shadow of yet another election in Europe, it feels as though while the Left has won a battle, it has still not figured out how to win the war. “Let’s start again,” tweeted Salvini as he boarded a train departing Emilia-Romagna. “He who hesitates is lost.”

https://twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1221774082162790402

Final polls for Sunday’s elections in Emilia-Romagna, before Italy’s statutory blackout in the fortnight before a vote, had the candidate for regional president of the Left-wing Partito Democratico (PD) neck and neck with Lucia Borgonzon, representative of Matteo Salvini’s Right-wing Lega.

If defeated in Emilia-Romagna, it is difficult to see how the PD dare muster the nerve to continue as junior partner in the national coalition government with the ever weaker alt-Left 5Stelle (5 Star), which continues to tear itself apart. On Wednesday, in a further sign of disarray, Luigi di Maio resigned as 5Stelle leader but remains Minister for Foreign Affairs.

When it came to power after the last general election in 2018 the anti-corruption movement 5Stelle, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo — a Genoan version of Billy Connolly — was Italy’s most popular party, polling at 32.7% (compared to then coalition partner the Lega’s 17.35%). But it has haemorrhaged support ever since and is now on just 15% compared to the Lega’s 33%.

Its coalition partner, the PD, is in equally dire straits even if it does hang on to Emilia-Romagna. It has also seen its suppport plummet and last September it split when former premier Matteo Renzi – Italy’s attempt at Tony Blair — refused to accept the coalition with 5Stelle and resigned to form a new party Italia Viva, which is now polling about 4%.

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If the marriage of 5Stelle and PD, sworn enemies until they formed a government and currently fielding opposing candidates in Emilia-Romagna, does collapse it will almost certainly mean a snap general election, which a Salvini-led Right-wing coalition would win by a mile, according to the polls.

These place the Lega consistently on 33% — as much as its two nearest rivals the PD and 5Stelle put together. So, with its traditional allies, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (6%) and the national conservative Fratelli d’Italia (10%), the Lega would have more than enough votes to get a working majority in Parliament.

Salvini would thus become Italy’s first elected prime minister since 2011 when Berlusconi resigned at the height of the Eurozone Crisis. None of the subsequent five was elected as premier — three were not even MPs or Senators.

Even Britain’s liberal-Left Guardian finds it impossible to praise Italy’s coalition government. The other day its Rome correspondent wrote that “the past four months have been marred by constant bickering and scant action on policy” and its budget “contains nothing that will tackle high unemployment or revive Italy’s long-stagnant economy”.

If the Lega wins Emilia-Romagna, then what might keep the coalition alive apart from a shared determination to keep Salvini out of government is the equally shared desire to keep getting paid bootloads of cash. Italian MPs are among the most rewarded on the planet, with a basic gross salary of €140,000 per year, which when expenses plus allowances are included rises to €230,000 per year.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Tories appeal to so many traditional Labour voters in red wall strongholds by pledging solutions to the problems those voters care about, so too does the Lega strike a chord with many former Italian communists in places like Emilia-Romagna.

All populists have this in common: they promise government programmes that combine, to a greater or lesser degree, Right-wing levels of patriotism and Left-wing levels of expenditure.

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And in Salvini the League has a charismatic leader who is popular with the working class because he shares their concerns and aspirations and who — like Johnson — has the gift of the gab and loves nothing better than to mix with ordinary people and have his selfie taken with them. And like Trump, Salvini is hyper active on social media with more than 3 .6 million followers on Facebook.

His latest ruse on the campaign trail was to press the intercom buzzer of a Tunisian immigrant family in a block of flats in Bologna whose son was said by local people to be a drug dealer. “Can I come up to your flat to speak to you about your son who local people round here say is a drug dealer?” Salvini said into the intercom. The scene was filmed and went viral. The son later told journalists he would sue those who sent Salvini to his family’s block of flats for defamation, but admitted he had been in prison for drug-related offences.

Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall Italy had the largest communist party outside the Soviet Bloc — the Partito Comunista Italiano  (PCI) — and Emilia-Romagna was its epicentre. This was the region where internationalism and then socialism first took hold at the end of the 19th century before evolving into communism after the First World War.

The PCI’s economic model ruled the roost in Emilia-Romagna for decades and consisted of publicly subsidised cooperatives which guaranteed jobs for the boys — party members — across huge swathes of the economy. The system worked because it was a closed shop.

Ironically, Emilia-Romagna is also where Benito Mussolini was born and then became the rising star of Italian revolutionary socialism as editor of daily newspaper Avanti! in Milan — before his expulsion from the party in 1914 after his refusal to oppose Italian entry into the war on the side of Britain and France.

He took that decision, as did the socialists in France and Germany but not Italy, because the war had made him realise that people — himself included — are more loyal to country than class and that therefore nations are superior to the internationale. In 1919, he founded fascism as a national, as distinct from international, version of socialism. The tectonic tensions that caused fascism are similar to those that cause populism — however different the consequences. Then as now patriotism, and what it means, played a crucial role.

At Brescello, the small town near the River Po used by Giovannino Guareschi as the model for his Don Camillo books, which pitted the communist mayor Peppone against the priest Don Camillo, Salvini posted a selfie on Facebook of himself next to the statue of Peppone with the caption:

“I bet today Peppone would vote Lega! You have no idea how many old communists have told me in the past few days: ‘The PD people prefer bankers to workers, this time I’m voting for you!'”

This was the region where at the end of the Second World War communist partisans massacred thousands of Italians without trial and covered it up for decades. Things have not changed that much; I live here, near Ravenna, and about 10 years ago received a bullet through the post with an anonymous death threat for my children because I had written an article stating that the Americans and British liberated Italy, not the partisans. The Communist partisans were, contrary to Left-wing propaganda, a military irrelevance, and they did not fight for democracy and La Patria but for communism and the Soviet Union.

The Left can still control the writing and teaching of history through its command of the education system and media, but not the workplace and community where it has become increasingly irrelevant. And that is why more and more working people here are turning to the Lega.

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Then there is the issue of money: average annual GDP per capita growth in Italy since the introduction of the euro has been zero. Italy’s government debt is 131% of GDP — and GDP is virtually stagnant. The economy has been in more or less permanent recession for years. Adult unemployment is officially about 10% but in reality is much more, as not many more than half of working age Italians do actually work. Youth unemployment, meanwhile, is more than 30%.

To make matters worse, 600,000 migrants, the vast majority of whom were not refugees according to the UN, have arrived in Italy since 2013 by sea from Libya — 335 miles away from Sicily. The Left, in power on its own most recently with Renzi followed by Paolo Gentiloni until 2018, did nothing to stop the migrant flow until its dying days, nor create jobs or protect italian workers from globalisation. It kowtowed to the EU’s diktat that austerity is the only solution to the eurozone crisis. Obviously, the eurocracy loves the Italian Left but the country’s hoi polloi increasingly do not.

Salvini promised a crackdown on mass illegal immigration and as deputy prime minister delivered. Indeed, his 2018 closure of Italy’s ports to charity ships ferrying migrants to Italy from the Libyan coast was practically the only concrete achievement of the last coalition government of 5Stelle and the League — apart from 5Stelle’s introduction for the first time of a non-contributory unemployment benefit system. Needless to say the new coalition has re-opened the ports.

But Salvini’s migrant crackdown was hugely popular with ordinary Italians. He also promised, and still does, an end to austerity with huge infrastructure investment, the breeching of the EU’s budget deficit limits, a flat tax for small businesses, a crackdown on crime, tough import laws to stop unfair trade, and the defence of Catholic values and the traditional nuclear family — hence his frequent brandishing of a rosary during speeches.

Whether or not this is a cynical ploy from the divorced Salvini, and whether or not the party are “racist” as its enemies claim, his message is one that resonates with millions of Italians battered for two decades by the EU, the euro and the forces of globalisation, and disillusioned with the Left’s abandonment of class warfare in favour of the identity war. A familiar story all over the West.

Throughout all of this, we learned a great deal about the current state of politics: that national populism has consolidated as a political force, that Green movements are gradually becoming more significant, that social democracy remains stuck in a state of crisis, that Europe’s political systems are continuing to fragment and that Brexit is now definitely going to happen.

Underneath all of this, we also learned some other things; that for millions of voters around the world feelings of cultural insecurity continue to matter as much as feelings of economic insecurity; that centre-Right parties such as Britain’s Conservatives or Austria’s People’s Party are starting to adapt far more effectively than Left-wing parties to this new political era; and that the Left still does not appear to have much of an answer to its fragmenting electorate.

Against this backdrop, then, what might 2020 have in store for us? Here are a few predictions to see us through.

First, starting here in Britain I predict that Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon period. With the largest Conservative majority since 1987, Prime Minister Johnson will inevitably pass his Withdrawal Agreement Bill. Aside from formalising Brexit this will allow him to claim with credibility to have honoured the result of the 2016 Referendum, as well as his 2019 promise to “Get Brexit Done”. It will also leave Johnson as the only Conservative leader to have truly triumphed over the Europe question, an issue that dogged all of his predecessors.

This year will also allow us to see how Johnson and his party plan to hold together an electorate that looks and feels fundamentally different from that which elected David Cameron in 2010 and 2015.

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Johnson’s following is older, more working-class, less well educated, heavily white and more socially conservative. This is why I predict some big, bold offers on immigration reform, crime, spending on infrastructure and other investment for the (non-London) regions. Expect lots of pictures and speeches outside the capital.

With a big majority, I also predict that this generation of Conservatives will want to go much further than their predecessors in pushing back against a “soft Left” bias that runs across much of Britain’s education sector and media. There is no point in winning a battle over Brexit if your party is simultaneously losing the longer-term war over culture.

Meanwhile, Remain will inevitably drift into Re-Join. Not only will this be a harder movement to sustain but it will also be one that will soon run out of steam. Babyboomers will struggle to turn pro-Remain sentiment into a viable political project, especially when the much younger Generation Z are far more concerned about the issue of climate change. There will be a hardcore of diehard Remainers continuing to rally around podcasts and Twitter Land but this will be a fringe movement, nothing more. More Brits will identify openly as “European” but this will not translate into any significant political change.

Labour, which just sunk to its lowest number of seats since 1935, will struggle to regroup this year. Corbynism has been removed as one possible reply to the wider crisis facing social democracy in Europe, as well as to questions that are being asked in the United States about where next for the Democrats. Economic populism, it turns out, is not as popular as many people think. It will also lose every time when presented with a centre-Right leader who is willing to lean Left on the economy while leaning Right on culture and identity. That too contains a message for the United States as it begins to gear up for November.

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Labour’s sudden rush into a leadership debate, the lack of any serious self-reflection on its defeat, the unimpressive opening statements of the leadership contenders and the deeper structural problems within its electorate all point to a long and slow walk through the wilderness rather than a quick recovery. Local elections in the spring of 2020 will likely add to this challenging year.

Look ahead at 2020, and when it comes to populism all eyes will be on the United States where I think, on balance, that Donald Trump will probably be re-elected.

There is certainly a lot running against the incumbent. His path to winning the electoral college remains narrow and his approval ratings are weak, especially when seen in historical perspective. In fact, his ratings are the lowest in any election year since Gerald Ford in 1976 (who went on to lose to Jimmy Carter).

But there is also a lot going for Trump, too. Among his core groups of voters — evangelicals, committed Republicans and the working class — his ratings are far stronger. And the Democrats have, at least in my view, so far shown little understanding about why Trump was elected in the first place or what they might say to win back key chunks of his electorate. Mobilising minorities and committed leftist activists will not be enough.

Then comes the narrative; Trump actually has a lot to say to voters. You might not like what he has to say but on the American economy, standing up to China, working to defend national borders and clamping down on terrorism and gang violence he does have a story to tell. What, in contrast, is the Democrat narrative? I’m not really sure. On top of this, we knew that Trump had a lot of negatives in 2015 and he still won.

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Europe’s national populists will continue their current success after their best year yet, when this disruptive political family went on to win its largest number of seats in the European Parliament. In Britain over 2019, Nigel Farage continued to pile pressure on the main parties via the Brexit Party, whose call for an Australian-based immigration points system and more work on tackling regional inequalities would later be adopted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

Elsewhere, new parties broke through; Forum for Democracy at municipal elections in the Netherlands and, more significantly, Vox at national elections in Spain. While In Italy, Matteo Salvini and the Lega lost power but won a record number of seats in the European Parliament and continue to enjoy healthy leads in the polls. Flemish Interest in Belgium won a new record share of the vote while the Alternative for Germany advanced at state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Poland, Law and Justice won their largest share of the vote on record.

Rather than weakening, national populism has consolidated and, as we head into a new decade, looks set to remain as a permanent force on the landscape, particularly as Europe’s political systems continue to fragment.

One final thing to watch out for in 2020 are the shifting political alliances. Boris Johnson is interesting because of the way in which he is seeking to usher in or revive a different brand of conservatism, which has seen his party forge an alliance-of-sorts with the left-behind working class — but this is not the only new alliance to keep eyes on.

At the recent election in Austria, the Greens enjoyed their strongest ever result but then proceeded to join a coalition government with the centre-Right People’s Party. And, interestingly, while they have introduced new environment taxes, the Greens have also signed up to some pretty hardline positions on immigration and integration; supporting measures to crack down on illegal migration, to curb “political Islam”, including the banning of headscarves for under-14-year-olds, and introducing preventative custody for individuals who are considered a risk to security but have committed no crime.

All of this is a reminder of the fact that, just because Green movements are doing a little bit better than in the past, that does not necessarily signal the return of a nice, fluffy brand of social liberalism. On the contrary, on the all-important questions about identity and culture much of Europe continues to drift further to the right, in response not only to national populism but also to the public mood. I see few reasons why that will change in 2020.