The trains have to run

In Nottinghamshire last year, a Reform-run county council spent £75,000 of public money on 164 Union flags hung from lampposts — sponsored, the chief whip Lee Anderson assured everyone, by local businesses queuing up to pay. A Freedom of Information request four months later revealed that not a single sponsorship agreement had been signed, while the same council was cutting £21 million from adult social care. The flags stayed up. This is governance as set-dressing, and it’s what remains when the operational substance has been promised away.

The populist right has won two battles that looked unwinnable a decade ago — taking the culture war and mixing entertainment, grievance and governance into a single combustible cocktail that the centre has no idea how to handle. It de-demonised itself somewhere along the way, becoming cooler, edgy, and above all entertaining to watch, and arrived in office on the strength of all three. The frontier it has not crossed, and the one that could bury it, is the dull one nobody campaigns on — institutional competence. The operational question — whether a movement that built itself on contempt for the administrative state can actually run it, staff the ministry, draft the law that survives the courts and deliver the things it was elected to deliver — remains open, and the answer accumulating across the last few years is that it cannot. That incapacity, not the judges or the deep state, is what will decide the movement’s next decade.

This is not a defence of the centrists the populists replaced. The reason a rational public keeps making what looks like an irrational choice is that the technocrats earned their rejection. The housing crisis, deindustrialisation, demographic decline, the precarity dressed up as the gig economy, inflation, and the quiet despair that descends on young adults contemplating their economic future are not grievances invented by Steve Bannon in a Brooklyn loft. They are the bequest of the There Is No Alternative consensus. Well, there is an alternative, and after the first shock of its arrival in office, it is here. The question is what it does once it arrives.

Consider Geert Wilders. He won the Dutch 2023 election, entered a four-party coalition under the technocrat Dick Schoof in July 2024, and pulled his own cabinet down almost a year later, because the strictest-ever asylum policy he had built the entire government around, could not be delivered fast enough by his own ministers. The man who had spent 20 years insisting that he was the only person in the Netherlands who could fix the asylum system became, once handed the asylum system, the one who couldn’t. He had promised the strictest asylum regime in Europe within the architecture of Dutch and EU law, which is roughly like promising to run a marathon backwards through traffic. When he failed, he had no second move. It turns out that wanting a thing loudly, for twenty years, in front of cameras, is not the same as knowing how to do it.

Reform UK is the same lesson in miniature, and here the populists deserve a fair hearing, because the councils they got in May 2025 inherited genuine ruin: structural debt, depleted reserves, and statutory obligations, above all in adult social care, that swallow most of a county budget before a single discretionary pound is spent. Running such a council well would test anyone. This, however, is precisely the point. The constraints were not hidden. The size of the social care bill is knowable to anyone who spends five minutes with a local government finance settlement, which means the council-tax freeze Reform promised on top of it was not undone by circumstance. It was undeliverable. Nine of the party’s ten flagship councils raised council tax in the end. The promised efficiency drive, modelled on the American fashion of the moment, quietly evaporated. Within a year. Reform had lost 74 of its 677 councillors to defection, suspension, resignation and expulsion. 

The pattern scales. The second Trump administration entered office with a popular-vote plurality and unified government, and still lost the centrepiece of its economic programme in February 2026. The Supreme Court ruled six to three in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 does not authorise a president to impose tariffs. The most conservative bench in living memory — three of its justices appointed by Trump himself — struck down the heart of his agenda on a legal reading his own lawyers had been warned about for over a year, leaving an estimated $166 to $175 billion in refunds owed. The Department of Government Efficiency, the chainsaw promised to the federal budget, was quietly hung up in November 2025, months ahead of schedule, after its own administrator conceded it no longer meaningfully existed. And the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, a former weekend television host elevated for loyalty rather than fitness, spent the spring of 2025 sharing F/A-18 launch times for live strikes through Signal with a group that included his wife, his brother and a personal lawyer. The Pentagon’s own inspector general concluded that he had created a risk that could have got American pilots killed. This, ultimately, is the predictable result of a system that recruits for fealty and discovers that fealty cannot read a balance sheet or a statute.

Alas, the populist right recruits for loyalty and proximity to the leader rather than for the unglamorous competence that actually staffs a functioning state. The promises do the rest of the damage, because they were never marketing to be quietly dialled back later, but the load-bearing claim of the whole enterprise. Millions supposedly deported on day one, a war settled in an afternoon, the central bank abolished, and a council tax frozen on top of a budget that cannot be frozen. There is nowhere to put the failure, either, because a movement built around one man keeps no institutional buffer between that man and the wreckage. The minister cannot be quietly sacrificed because he is the regime.

Which brings us, unavoidably, to Giorgia Meloni, the figure half the populist right defends as its model and half attacks as its sell-out. She has held office longer than any post-war Italian prime minister bar Berlusconi and Craxi, and she has done it by accepting institutional reality and harvesting symbolic wins within it: a migration deal loudly defended even as the courts dismantled it, a windfall tax on banks walked back within a week once the markets recoiled, a surrogacy ban delivered as the cultural prize, the recovery funds spent under Brussels supervision. This is competent coalition management, and it is the most uncomfortable model in the file, because it suggests that the route to durable government on the right runs not through breaking the system but through accepting it and taking what it will yield. Meloni works because she stopped being radical. The question is whether she is the model or the exception, and the early evidence, from a continent strewn with collapsed cabinets and lost councils, points to the exception.

The next right-wing governments will be more competent, or they will keep losing power

The alternative to her discipline is the chainsaw, and its most celebrated wielder shows the cost. Javier Milei has a genuine record: monthly inflation down from more than 25 percent to around 2, the first Argentine fiscal surplus in over a decade, a midterm victory that beat every poll. He also kept the central bank he had promised to abolish, and it survived a currency run only through an unprecedented $20 billion lifeline from the US Treasury, while leaked recordings alleged that his own sister had taken a cut of state pharmaceutical contracts, an accusation that would have ended a Peronist presidency within the week. Milei survives because his coalition has decided the chainsaw is worth the scandal. That may be defensible but it is not obviously sustainable.

The choice is stark — govern inside the constraints and underperform on the promises, or dismantle the constraints and deliver, at the price of the regime ceasing to be a liberal democracy and the rot eventually reaching the coalition that put you there. There is no third path. The chaotic-outsider mode of Wilders, Reform and the early Trump is not an escape from the choice but a brief, noisy delay before the collapse into one side of it. 

The next right-wing governments will be more competent, or they will keep losing power, because in the end the trains have to run, however well you try to persuade people that they are still approaching their destination.