Why Populists Are Winning

'Required reading' Andrew Marr, New Statesman
In 2024, two billion people went to vote - and populism won big. Donald Trump returned to the White House. Marine Le Pen surged in France. Reform UK became Britain's most successful far-right party in modern history. Across the West, authoritarian populists now govern one-quarter of the world's democracies.
But is this peak populism - or the populists' tipping point?
From the counting halls of inner-city Birmingham to the trading floors of Wall Street, from the Heritage Foundation war room to the algorithmic outrage machines of social media, Liam Byrne exposes the forces propelling the populist surge - and reveals how to stop it.
Drawing on original polling of thousands of voters, interviews with leading thinkers, and on-the-ground reporting across Britain, Europe and America, Byrne decodes the populist playbook. He reveals populism's five tribes, showing which voters can still be won back. He traces the millions flowing into Britain's populist media-political complex. He maps the rhetoric populists use to weaponise fear and nostalgia. And he warns: democracies rarely collapse in normal times - they fall after the next crisis, when hope collapses.
WHY POPULISTS ARE WINNING sets out a bold plan to rebuild the radical centre of Western politics. It is a field manual for democratic renewal - written for anyone who refuses to let fear win.

The Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP is a British Labour Party politician and the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North. He is a member of His Majesty's Privy Council and the Chair of the House of Commons Business and Trade Select Committee. He chaired the Global Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund 2019-2025. He served in the Cabinet in 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty's Treasury. An Honorary Professor of Social Science at the University of Birmingham, Liam was the 2024-2025 Visiting Parliamentary Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Harvard Business School and Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Before entering politics, Liam first worked in strategic consulting and banking; in 2000, he founded a fast-growing venture-backed European technology company. He is the author of more than twenty publications on economics, foreign policy and public service reform. His book, THE INEQUALITY OF WEALTH: WHY IT MATTERS AND HOW TO FIX IT, was shortlisted for the Westminster Book Awards 2024.