The Third Wave: The International Financial Crisis and Refugees

This chapter examines the third wave of nativist populism in the post-war era, which began to brew in the wake of the International Financial Crisis starting in 2008. A fundamental shift occurred in the third wave with the Refugee Crisis heightening in 2015. Nativist populism spread further into the mainstream in European and American politics than ever before, for instance bringing Brexit to the UK, Donald Trump to power in America and Marine Le Pen qualifying to the second round in the presidential elections in France. Indeed, this was a brand-new world. The four largest democracies in the world—Brazil, Indonesia and India in addition to the US—were all governed by politicians often labelled as being populist. With the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020 nationalist sentiments were hightening again. Whichever way we attempt to slice this trend, the third wave brought a fundamental shift in the evolution of nativist populism and came to constitute a clear trend of Neo-Nationalism spreading across Europe, America and elsewhere.