The pandemic has exposed deep vulnerabilities in this city, province and country, exploiting nearly every system and institution we failed to fortify. Rodriques’s death sits at the intersection of many of these failures.

This article places Europe’s current populist explosion — in left, right, and nonpartisan versions — in context. Above all, it emphasizes populism’s status as the political child of the thirty-year-long decline of party democracy. It offers a balance sheet for each populist variant, focusing in particular on the left populist experiments, and it closes with a proposal for a class-based socialist alternative.