Has Europe reached peak populism?

It’s been a bad week for Europe’s populists. A string of election results and scandals across the continent is making the political movement look a little shakier than before.

The confluence of events is too tempting to ignore, and it raises an interesting question: has populism in Europe reached its high water mark?

In Austria, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced his resignation on Saturday following allegations he encouraged the use of public funds to buy himself positive press coverage.

Whereas Angela Merkel refused to do business with Germany’s Alternative for Germany, Kurz entered into a power-sharing agreement with Austria’s far-right Freedom party in his first term, co-opting its hardline stance on immigration in the process.

It’s not quite curtains for Kurz. As President of his Austrian People’s party he can exert substantial influence. But the debacle is a major blow to the party, and a speedy return to power seems unlikely.

In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Northern League, which rose to prominence by hoovering up votes in Italy’s former Communist heartlands, is in turmoil after a roasting in local elections last week. The League’s ex-coalition partner Five Star also fared abysmally, losing control of the Rome and Turin mayoralties.

Salvini’s decision for his party to join the broad coalition government headed by the self-described “liberal socialist” Mario Draghi earlier this year has alienated swathes of its support base.

The League’s vote share has dwindled from 34 per cent at the European elections in 2019 to 20 per cent today. Salvini has openly spoken about being replaced.

The anti-establishment League and Five Star parties, which teamed up to form Italy’s first populist government in 2018, were used as models for protest movements around the world.

But the result appears to signal the end of Italy’s infatuation with populism. “Five Star and the League are no longer the channels of discontent in Italy,” said Massimo Franco of Italy’s top daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

Then there’s the Czech Republic. In a stunning election upset over the weekend that confounded pollsters and pundits, the centre-right SPOLU alliance finished ahead of populist prime minister Andrej Babis’s ANO party. It is likely to end his spell at the top.

Babis – a billionaire identified in the Pandora Papers as having allegedly transferred $22m through shell companies to conceal his purchase of a Cannes villa – has long-flirted with Euroscepticism and an “illiberal” policy agenda echoing that of his neighbour, Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

His ally, President Zeman, has been the driving force behind the country’s tentative courtship of China and Russia.

Czech relations with Brussels fell to a new low after a European Commission audit in April found Babis to have breached conflict of interest rules. The EU threatened to withhold vital payments until anti-corruption laws were reformed, and a second term for Babis would have escalated tensions still further.

The country now has a chance to reset. According to Filip Kostelka, a lecturer in government at the University of Essex, a SPOLU-led government “will mean a stabilisation of Czech democracy and a strong confirmation of its Western commitments, to the EU and NATO”.

Despite these setbacks, the nativist impulse is still alive and kicking across the continent. In Hungary, Orban’s cocktail of “Orbanomics” and social conservatism remains popular, empowering him to stretch the limits of the law to bend the media and the courts to his will. And Poland’s Law & Justice Party is presiding over a rift with Brussels that the EU warns is putting Warsaw on a “path to Polexit”.

But even if populism isn’t finished, the events this week show that it might just be losing momentum.