UK's May Scores High in Populist Speech Rating - Reports
UK Prime Minister Theresa May was found to be at times almost as populist in her public speeches as US President Donald Trump, according to a study out Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th March, 2019) UK Prime Minister Theresa May was found to be at times almost as populist in her public speeches as US President Donald Trump, according to a study out Wednesday.
The research commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to Team Populism, an international group of scholars, looked at at least four speeches of 138 heads of government since the start of the century.
It found that, besides Italy which the paper said has a history of electing populist leaders, no other western European head of state scored as high as May for populism.
She scored 0.
5 on a scale of 0-2, where 0 stands for "not populist" and 2 for "very populist." Brazil's rightwing President Jair Bolsonaro had the same result, while Trump scored 0.8.
All May's predecessors scored lower than her. David Cameron was found not populist at all, while Tony Blair and Gordon Brown scored 0.1.
May owes her ranking mostly to a speech she made at the Conservative Party conference in October 2016, the first since the referendum on Brexit, where she slammed those "in positions of power" for looking down on ordinary working people, a telltale sign of populism.