You can't take Le Pen's results in the past and put a ruler on it and draw a line into the future.
Most also seemed to have missed the fact that Wilders in the Netherlands and Le Pen in France considered their results failures.
Wilders was convinced he was going to get 30 to 35 seats in parliament but ended up with 20. That's 5 more than he previously had but way short of his own expectations.
Le Pen's Front National had said that anything below 40% would be considered a failure. And after the 34% result even Marine's father Jean-Marie called her a big failure.
This was supposed to be the big populist spring. In the wake of Brexit and Trump a wave of populism would conquer Europe. The populist movements even had a meeting on January 21st, the day after the Trump inauguration, to celebrate and coordinate this.
It went downhill from there.
The main attendants at that meeting, Le Pen, Wilders and Petry have now either been beaten in elections, sidelined in coalition talks or pushed aside within their own party.
With that, discontent in Europe is not gone of course. Discontent might even grow but there is a growing realisation that populism isn't providing real answers. And with this we get to the crux of the matter. Europeans have seen that happening in the UK and in the US with Trump.
In the Netherlands. A daily show type program launched the hashtag #Hoedan? (#how?) after a segment on how Wilders would execute his slogans into real policy. Nobody could tell. Least of it Wilders himself. The hashtag took off after that.
In the last French debate Le Pen was never able to go past name calling and had no answer to substantive questions. While Macron had very detailed policy answers.
His numbers in the polls went up significantly after that. The result, in this case, could actually be predicted with putting a ruler on the last few polls and continue the line. (Contrary to what Nate Silver now still claims, that the French polls were off. They weren't. They were spot on.)
There is also a growing feeling in Europe that Trump's US hasn't got our back, as the US had for 70 years, anymore. Europe needs to stand on its own feet and that's hard when you are 27 small countries.
It is not coincidental that an openly pro European candidate like Macron, who came from nothing mind you, won the election. Also in the Netherlands the pro EU parties GroenLinks and D66 won big. So there is a tendency starting to look at the EU in a more positive way.
The hardcore following will stay and keep supporting and the populist movement will not completely wither away or disappear but in order to grow they will need to formulate actual policies beyond the slogans, based in fact, not on gut feeling. That will prove a hard nut to crack. If not impossible.
