As we have seen from Saturday’s European parliamentary elections, Europe’s populist movements rode high on the crest of a wave whipped up by the post-2008 financial crisis, economic recession, large-scale immigration and disgust with so much incompetence and corruption in national politics.
In April 2010, the German influential newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asked the soft-spoken president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, in a short interview what were the biggest risks facing Europe and he replied: “the great danger facing Europe is populism...”
Four years later, in the elections just held, his warning was extraordinary prophetic.