In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:
- Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, again
Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).
I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
As background, this party was founded about 8 months before the election in 1991, almost like a fluke. It was not a grass roots movement, but by charismatic founders that quickly had to build an organisation around some hollow ideas about less bureaucracy and lower taxes.
Maybe 8 parties narrows the lesser evil down a bit.. But they all end up in coalition anyway so I'm pretty sure i get the same amount of evil as in a 2-party system.
Admittedly there is a bureaucratic logjam in the UK that hampers any progress but I don't see that going with fptp, I'd anticipate it getting much, much worse under prop-rep.
I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.
But wouldn’t you agree that both NYD and SD were both founded on populist principles? Apart from racism, neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty well established by policy researchers. It’s in the first sentence on both parties’ Swedish Wikipedia pages.
