Thank you very much. That's obviously an important question.

I think there are a lot of ideological similarities. Again, I think the main driving force of how to understand populism is just the anti-establishment element, which basically delegitimizes anybody who disagrees with those forces. I think you see that very similarly, whether it is in the form of Donald Trump, the form of the Polish government, the form of the Hungarian government or the form of the larger rising populist movements, even in countries like Germany, Scandinavia and so on.

I think one important difference is that a lot of the European populist forces are actually better set up to undermine the political system because they have managed to build organizations so that when they come into government, they are able to appoint a lot of like-minded people. They are starting, in many countries in Europe, to have real bureaucratic experience and expertise, because they've been in parliament in many places now for about a decade. They've had experience in government in some places again and again, so I think their actual ability to pursue their agenda can sometimes be strong.

What we see in the United States is not the rise of a new populist party with a slow growth in strength that ultimately takes over the system, but a hostile takeover of a pre-existing political party by one populist. Now, obviously, I think Donald Trump has in the last two and a half years managed to create a circle of people around him, and he has managed to turn the Republican Party into a populist force to a much greater extent than people would have predicted when he was elected in the fall of 2016. But I do think that the combination of a lack of bureaucratic and government experience in Donald Trump himself, and the lack of a coherent organization around him that actually is deeply committed to his agenda, has somewhat frustrated what he has been able to do.

To me, the greater question is what will happen in the United States if populism remains in control of the Republican Party after 2020 or 2024 and you end up with a president and an administration, a cohort of people, who are actually ideologically committed to some of the things that Donald Trump stands for. I think at that point the damage to the system could be a lot more severe than what we're seeing at the moment.

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