How to stop a populist

To the relief of most everyone (except his supporters), the far-right politician Geert Wilders lost in the Dutch elections. Or at least he didn’t win, which, by the world’s increasingly low standards for celebration, was seemingly good enough. Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which had made anti-Muslim bigotry its defining message, won around 13 percent of the seats, making it the second-largest party in parliament. The populists may be losing steam, but the bigger, and rather unsexy, lesson is that one of the most effective bulwarks against ethno-nationalists holding power is having the right kind of electoral system.

The fears of Wilders “winning” were somewhat overblown. Even if his party had come in first, it would have been almost impossible to form a coalition government, considering the level of party fragmentation. In a 150-seat parliament, a simple majority of 76 is required to form a government. A first-place finish of, say, 35 seats would have still been more than 40 seats short. The mainstream parties would have almost certainly imposed a cordon sanitaire on the Party for Freedom. As the Dutch analyst Anno Bunnik wrote in frustration over the fixation on Wilders: “In a system in which several parties must form a coalition government such a size of the pie is useless if no one wants to work with you.” In other words, in a parliamentary system, it is possible to win without winning.

In a two-party presidential system, as we have learned, an illiberal populist can win outright, assuming a certain level of charisma, and assuming a weak opponent—always a possibility with the Democratic Party’s vapid techno-liberalism. Ideally, in the American system, both parties have to move to the center, but this presumes that the center is strong enough to hold.

There is also the question of what to do in the event of buyer’s remorse. Where prime ministers are subject to no-confidence votes, as in the Netherlands, presidents are generally difficult to impeach. Despite their claims to the contrary, presidents invariably represent one party—their own. And with high levels of polarization, it becomes almost impossible to imagine a party willingly turning against its own president. As it turns out, it is also nearly impossible to imagine the U.S. moving from majoritarian to consensual democracy, since whoever happens to be in the majority at any given moment usually ends up liking it quite a lot.