Britain’s vote by a slim margin last week to leave the EU wasn’t supposed to happen. On the morning of the vote, polls gave “leave” only a slim chance of winning. Unexpected as it was, the Brexit referendum wasn’t an isolated incident. In fact, it fits into a larger global narrative of populist uprisings destabilizing the status quo.
Back in January, a team of analysts from Citi put together a huge report on this new world order. The report referred to the risk of deviating from the political status quo “vox populi” (the “voice of the people” in Latin).
Citi uses the term to mean populist movements and new upstart political parties on the edges of the spectrum, coupled with non-existent global economic growth and governments that are unable or unwilling to do much about the increasing inequality.
This means that various popular movements, like the Brexit campaign in Britain, Donald Trump here in the U.S., far-right parties in Europe, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, and even resistance to the rush of migrants from the Middle East into Europe, are inter-connected. (Syria’s civil war, remember, began during the Arab Spring uprising.) Essentially, these sorts of movements destabilize the status quo, and therefore are likely to destabilize global markets.
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