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.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.