The year of the political outsider will reach its zenith next month, at conventions likely to be far removed from the choreographed backslapping more usually enjoyed by presidential nominees.



At his Republican coronation in Cleveland, Donald Trump plans choreography of a different sort: a series of “showbiz” performances to enliven the once “boring” speeches that traditionally start the race to the White House.

The king of reality television has finally persuaded reluctant party leaders to endorse him. He also promises to appear onstage on each of the four days in Ohio, lest one unconventional showstopper is not enough.

It is expected that in Philadelphia a week later, Hillary Clinton will reassert control over the Democratic party. But the persistent appeal of her populist opponent, Bernie Sanders, has forced concessions that would also once have been unthinkable.

In deference to his surprisingly competitive showing in the primary, party leaders have agreed to allow the Vermont leftwinger to nominate five outsiders to the convention’s influential platform committee.

Alongside the operatives and insiders selected by Clinton will sit the American academic Cornel West, who roiled Washington’s Democratic establishment last year by accusing Barack Obama of selling out to the “white supremacy”.

It may prove a canny move by Clinton, who hopes to unify her party against Trump even if she loses the last big primary in California on Tuesday. But plans by Sanders supporters to hold four separate protest rallies during the convention suggest that “boring” is unlikely to apply as an adjective in Philadelphia either.

By what standard this is judged depends not only on whether violent protests against Trump mar proceedings in Cleveland, but also on whether similar political turmoil continues elsewhere in the world.

Four weeks before the start of US convention season, millions of British voters will go to the polls in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union that could forever change the shape of the world’s second-largest economic bloc.

If, as some polls indicated this week, the answer is yes, it could force another referendum on whether Scotland leaves the United Kingdom, and pose fresh questions for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, who has much in common with Sanders.

On the continent, things have not been much calmer. A week ago, another leftwing, independent candidate narrowly prevented Austria from becoming the first EU country to elect a far-right head of state, after a knife-edge election. Retired economics professor Alexander Van der Bellen defeated defeated Norbert Hofer, of the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic Freedom party, by just 50.3% to 49.7%.

In France last month, thousands of protesters brought Paris to a standstill in Nuit Debout sit-ins that have been compared to the Occupy movement.

Where it was mostly leftwing political outsiders such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain who previously captured the anti-establishment mood in Europe, this summer, far-right groups such as France’s Front National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) and Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom are attracting most attention.

The common theme is often scepticism about globalisation and a desire for more national solutions Tom Wright, Brookings Institution

Though many are sworn political enemies and from radically divergent traditions, all share much in common, at least according to the growing army of academics and analysts trying to make sense of the topsy-turvy political climate.

“Populism is a broad tent and there are those with more benign responses and those that are more malignant, so it’s unfair to generalise too much,” says Tom Wright, director of the project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“But the common theme is often scepticism about globalisation and a desire for more national solutions.”

The mood is infectious. Protectionist arguments that first drew support to Trump and Sanders, particularly in hard-pressed manufacturing states, have also encouraged Clinton to shift her policy on the free trade agreements championed by Barack Obama.

Perhaps the biggest difference between right- and leftwing expressions of this economic discontent is opposition to immigration, which has driven some voters towards Trump and anti-EU groups like Britain’s Brexit movement, but featured much less in the relatively more inclusive socialism of Sanders and Corbyn.

But in many other regards, these extremely diverse political responses stem from common concerns: principally, maintaining economic living standards that have struggled to recover since the 2008 banking crash.

“Trump is quite an extreme manifestation, but we’ve been here before,” says Wright. “Several studies have shown that there tends to be an upsurge in this sort of political response for the first 10 years after an economic shock.

“We are coming up for 10 years since the financial crisis, and the six-million-dollar question now is whether this is outside the normal parameters or whether we are now reaching a high-water mark.”

‘Globalisation is being attacked as never before’



Bernie Sanders speaks in Palo Alto. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

A win for Clinton over Trump in November’s election and a victory for the Remain campaign in the Brexit referendum might take some of the drama away, but the question on many lips in Washington is whether the wider pressure for change is unstoppable.

Poor US employment numbers on Friday, for example, are giving rise to fresh concern about whether even the low-wage recovery in the economy is running out of steam. With median incomes still far from recovering their pre-crisis peak, another slowdown could fuel the anti-globalisation backlash long after Trump, Sanders and the current crop of European nationalists have moved on.

One sign of this concern came from an unlikely quarter last month, in a little-noticed speech given by Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of the multinational industrial giant General Electric. He described the global economy as “the most uncertain I have ever seen”.

“Protectionism is rising. Globalisation is being attacked as never before,” Immelt told graduating students at New York University’s Stern Business School, saying it was time for companies to “localise” in response.

Ted Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, describes the otherwise obscure address as “the most important foreign policy speech of the year” – strong words in a year of Trump and Clinton counter-blasts.

“Watching the current presidential campaign and the rise of Donald Trump’s rightwing populism, it is easy to close your eyes and hope that this will be a passing moment, like, say, Pat Buchanan’s GOP bid in 1996 or Ross Perot’s third-party run in 1992,” says Alden.

“But the leader of a $300bn company cannot afford to bet on wishful thinking. And so, Immelt said, General Electric is already retooling its business based on the expectation that the current backlash against globalisation is not a passing moment, but rather a new reality to which business has no choice but to respond.”

This challenge to the postwar consensus in favour of free trade and free-market orthodoxy is perhaps what distinguishes the current crop of political outsiders most.

Though he served as governor of California, Ronald Reagan was once seen as just as much of an anti-establishment outsider as Trump. But Reagan’s populism was channelled through policies that ultimately strengthened the world’s economic and political establishment, something many Republicans remain unsure of.

It may not be such a bad thing, as far as many voters are concerned. Since Reagan succeeded in winning many blue collar workers from the Democrats, his party has struggled to win any presidential election convincingly.

“The last time we won with relative ease was 1988,” conceded party chairman Reince Priebus in a recent meeting with reporters.

This week has seen a stronger performance from Clinton, reassuring some of those in Washington who had begun to worry whether she was equipped to take on this populist surge.

Her destruction of Trump’s foreign policy at a speech in Los Angeles showed Democrats that they may not be united on domestic issues yet, but they share a common fear of Trump’s finger on the nuclear button.

But whether you describe it pejoratively as “populism”, or, as Sanders and Corbyn supporters prefer refer to it, simply as “popular democracy”, many suspect the genie will not go back into the bottle so easily this time around.

“Even if Clinton wins, there is likely to be a big focus on what steps need to be taken to address people’s economic insecurities,” says Tom Wright, at Brookings.

“The 1930s was different because governments took steps that made economic problems worse. But you can imagine if Trump wins the election, the US could do something similar.

“Starting a trade war and unravelling strategic alliances could be very destructive.”