![]() However, as was not as much reported, she was also by far the most unpopular politician in the country, making her chances at winning the second-round runoff slim to none. For much of the previous years Marine Le Pen had led the polls as the most popular politician in France. The French presidential elections the next month were the real test for the dominant narrative, however, as they were the only winner-takes-all election of the group. Rutte declared that his “good populism” had defeated Wilders’ “bad populism” and the international media ran with it. Instead, Prime Minister Mark Rutte was the big political “winner,” despite being an electoral loser, by adopting the discourse and in part policies of the PVV. The dominant narrative of an emboldened populism defeating an embattled status quo got its first hit in the Dutch parliamentary elections of March, in which Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) underperformed, even compared to the more realistic polls directly preceding the elections. ![]() Particularly in the British and US media the narrative was that the Brexit/ Trump earthquakes would lead to massive aftershocks on the European Continent, leading to the demise of long-serving centrist leaders, like Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, and to the rise of new, populist leaders like Marine Le Pen in France. With elections scheduled in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands, to name the most prominent ones, all eyes were on the “populists,” which, in the vast majority of cases, were the populist radical right. While 2016 was the year of the populist surprise, 2017 was supposed to be the year of the populist victory.
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