The Decline of the Postwar Settlement and the Rise of the ‘New’ Protest Parties

Abstract

The well-spring from which both the New Politics and the New Populism draw is the politics of discontent of a Western Europe in flux. It is a frustration born out of perceptions of unresolved crises, and of the collapse of stability. The stability may never have been much more than an illusion based on unprecedented economic growth, but it was, even if just an illusion, the basis on which an order was constructed. That order varied across different countries but many of the basic elements remained constant. That constancy was the postwar settlement: a social consensus, a set of distinct political structures and a number of shared economic goals.