Politics? No, of course not. I’m talking about populism. A catch-all term which encompasses Brexit, Trump, and the right-wing surge across Europe. But are we even sure we know what that means?
According to the Oxford Dictionary, populism defines a) support for the concerns of ordinary people, and b) the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people.
Okay, and now a definition from the Cambridge Dictionary: “Political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want”.
Depends on semantics, I guess, but surely politicians with the support of ordinary people are a good thing? Or should we all be governed with stick over carrot?
Use of the term over the past 12 months has clearly been pitched as an ‘us vs them’ mentality, or perhaps ‘masses vs the elite’. The suggestion being that the voters are actually the worst judges of what they really want.
Anyway, with the polls suggesting a close call between the Conservatives and Labour on Thursday (and they’re always right, right?), it is no great surprise that investors are feeling nervous. This is especially true when business growth appears to be slowing.
Still, who you might call the ‘nationalist’ parties – i.e. UKIP, SNP etc appear to be losing ground, meaning the election here is very different from, say, what we saw in France or the Netherlands earlier this year.
But be warned, Virginie Maisonneuve, chief investment officer at Eastspring Investments, still suggests that voters will continue to be driven to extremes in their future electoral choices because of what she sees as a “structural disconnection between traditional political parties and economic realities”.
