Why voters in liberal-democracies are turning to populism — and what we're getting wrong about it?
By Dr Vera Michlin-Shapir · Defence Strategic Communications, Autumn 2025

"Happy countries are all alike; every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way."
Adapted from Tolstoy by Michlin-Shapir

Something strange is happening in the world's comfortable middle. The Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, the United Kingdom — countries that rank well on various indices, that are prosperous and stable by most measures — are producing some of the most dramatic surges in populist politics the democratic world has ever seen. Writing for NATO's Defence Strategic Communications journal, Dr Vera Michlin-Shapir sets out to explain why, drawing on three new books that dare to ask not just what populism is, but what it feels like — and why that distinction matters more than most liberals care to admit.

Michlin-Shapir's review essay covers Claire Yorke's Empathy in Politics and Leadership, Eva Illouz's The Emotional Life of Populism, and Sarah Stein Lubrano's Don't Talk about Politics. Together, these three authors — a British political scientist, an Israeli sociologist, and a theorist of cognitive psychology — converge on a single uncomfortable truth: liberal democracy has systematically underestimated the role of emotion in political life. While mainstream politicians perfected the art of sleek, managed messaging and technocratic problem-solving, populists were doing something far simpler and far more powerful. They were making people feel heard. As Michlin-Shapir summarises Yorke's argument, populist leaders connect with voters' feelings in ways that mainstream politics, obsessed with professionalism and polish, long ago abandoned. The result is a democratic deficit not of institutions, but of emotional intelligence.

Perhaps the most striking insight in Michlin-Shapir's analysis comes from Illouz, who draws on Seymour Martin Lipset's theory of political responses to economic loss. The turn to populism, Illouz argues, is driven less by actual deprivation than by the imagined or anticipated loss of status and privilege. This explains the counterintuitive geography of the populist wave: it takes root not among the desperate and destitute at the bottom of the economic ladder, but among those who are doing reasonably well yet fear they may not be for long. Post-2008 stagnant wages, rising living costs, and the sense that political institutions protected financial elites rather than ordinary citizens created the emotional raw material — fear, resentment, disgust — that populists have so effectively weaponised. Lubrano adds a further layer: our political identities are not products of rational deliberation in a marketplace of ideas, as liberal theory likes to suppose, but are bound up in our deepest sense of self. You cannot simply argue someone out of a worldview that is part of who they are. That, Michlin-Shapir suggests, is the clarity trap liberals keep falling into — and the one they most urgently need to escape.