UK Guardian: Why UKIP, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream

These populists are asking the right questions, but they don't have the answers. Mainstream parties must revitalise and respond

The rise of populism across western Europe and the US – especially in its radical right form – poses more fundamental questions for democrats than has been acknowledged. Whether we are talking about UKIP, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement or the Tea Party, populists of all kinds are exposing old and hidden fault lines in democracy, and mainstream democrats need a greater alertness to the nature of the threat.

Populists pose a basic question: why is democracy not run as the true expression of a morally pure "will of the people" against a self-serving and corrupt political, bureaucratic, plutocratic or legal elite? This is a forceful question as old as democracy itself and it reveals what has become liberal democracy's unspoken compromise – democracy is bounded by institutions, laws and constitutional limits. It is democracy through pluralism and compromise; "minorities rule" as the American democratic theorist, Robert Dahl, described it.

Mainstream democrats take their cue from American republican democracy with its checks and balances and self-restraint. This is an impediment to the true democracy for populists. They wish to sweep away any barrier to their desired ends – whether of the left or the right.

So the Tea Party proposes a radical reduction of the role of the federal government in the US political system. The FPÖ challenged the authority of Austrian courts with respect to upholding minority rights. UKIP demands a UK withdrawal from the EU. The Front National drives an anti-Islamic and anti-Gypsy agenda in France. Geert Wilders' PVV – following in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn – also confronts fears over the growth of Islam and its purported incompatibility with Dutch values. Viktor Orbán's Fidesz rewrote the Hungarian constitution to give the executive more authority over the courts and to safeguard "traditional family values".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/24/ukip-tea-party-beppe-grillo-threat