In this year of elections, voters in countries representing 41% of the world’s population will go to the polls — and in a terrifying number of cases, candidates who would have been seen as extremist wild cards in 2016 look the strongest. Geert Wilders set the tone by winning the largest number of seats in the Dutch elections in November, giving him first dibs at forming a government. Le Pen is currently the likeliest to succeed Macron in 2027, with nervousness about her party’s extremism abating. Writing in Foreign Policy, John Kampfner predicts that right-wing populism “is set to sweep the West in 2024,” with likely advances in the European Parliament, Austria, Portugal and Germany, where the hard-right Alternative for Germany party is expected to do well. – Bloomberg