Elite contempt for populist challengers backfired into their electoral triumph.

Evidence

In Italy, Beppe Grillo’s notion to compete for the presidency of the Democratic Party (PD)—after having surfed the wave of antipolitics for years—was welcomed with irony. The PD leader sneered in 2009 that Grillo should “set up a party and stand in elections,” adding that “we would see how many votes he gets.” Karma took its revenge: less than ten years later, the Five Star Movement was the largest individual party in Italy, with a clear majority of seats in parliament. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 95

Categorization

• CANDY: The PD leader’s sneer repaid by Five Star’s rise is a great dinner-party anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Elite convergence on austerity, not austerity itself, triggered the populist breach — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 118; The 1990 Peruvian runoff pitted an elite against a mass candidate. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 53