ABSTRACT
In 2017, pundits and scholars ‘discovered’ populism. Brexit, Donald Trump, and elections in Austria, the Netherlands and France contributed to this discovery. Elections in spring 2012 pointed to a nationalist and populist turn in European politics. This chapter focuses on those elections as ‘prologue’. Spring 2012 represented a transition point in European political culture. The acceleration and normalisation of the European nationalist right is the collateral damage from three crises: austerity; security and refugee. The European sovereign debt crisis at the centre of this chapter was the first crisis that exposed cracks in the European political infrastructure.
