Why Ukip, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream

Why Ukip, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

These populists are asking the right questions, but they don't have the answers. Mainstream parties must revitalise and respond 
By Anthony Painter

• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 March 2013 10.13 EDT 
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Ukip supporters with 'Thank you' leaflets in Eastleigh, where the party came second in the recent byelection. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The rise of populism across western Europe and the US – especially in its radical right form – poses more fundamental questions for democrats than has been acknowledged. Whether we are talking about Ukip, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement or the Tea Party, populists of all kinds are exposing old and hidden fault lines in democracy, and mainstream democrats need a greater alertness to the nature of the threat. Modern democracy, like a hot-air balloon untethered from the ground, is suddenly floating free and its destination is not yet known.

Italy's Grillo exposed as tool of State Department, Goldman Sachs

PressTV - Italy's Grillo exposed as tool of State Department, Goldman Sachs

Dr. Webster Griffin Tarple | More articles by Dr. Webster Griffin Tarple

Italian Five Star Movement political leader Beppe Grillo

Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:22AM GMT

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By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley

The power vacuum is largely the work of the right-wing demagogue Beppe Grillo and his band of enraged petty-bourgeois novices. During the current negotiations to form a government to replace Monti and his sociopathic technocrats, Grillo’s position has been the same as that of Hitler after the German election of July 1932, when the Nazi leader, citing the fact that he controlled the largest single political party (although not an absolute majority), refused to support anyone but himself to head the next government."