Five of the world's largest democracies now have populist governments, claimed the Guardian last week, and proceeded to name four: the United States, India, Brazil and the Philippines. Which is the fifth? At various points it name-checks Turkey, Italy and the United Kingdom, but it never becomes clear which. (And by the way, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, is not a populist. He's just a nationalist.)
It's embarrassing when a respected global newspaper launches a major investigative series and can't really nail the subject down. Neither can the people it interviews: Hillary Clinton, for example, admits she was "absolutely dumbfounded" by how Donald Trump ate her lunch every day during the 2016 presidential campaign. She still doesn't get it.
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"We got caught in a kind of transition period so what I had seen work in the past ... was no longer as appealing or digestible to the people or the press. I was trying to be in a position where I could answer all the hard questions, but ... I never got them. I was waiting for them; I never got them. Yet I was running against a guy who did not even pretend to care about policy."
Yes, Trump is a classic populist, but why did he beat her two years ago when he wouldn't even have got the nomination 10 years ago? She doesn't seem to have a clue about that, and neither do other recent leaders of centre-left parties interviewed by the Guardian like Britain's Tony Blair and Italy's Matteo Renzi. So let us try to enlighten them.