Like Trump, Europe’s populists win big with rural voters

The red-tiled roofs of this tiny village cluster around the soaring steeples of St. Bartholomew Church like medieval cottages at the base of a castle, alienated from the cosmopolitan life of cities such as Warsaw by a chasm that is economic, cultural and political.

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Asking how many people here attend Sunday Mass elicits puzzlement. Everyone, of course. There are no shopping malls, no car-choked boulevards and no doubt where political sentiments lie: The village voted 83 percent for Poland’s ruling populist party, joining a rural electoral wave that swept the party to power a year ago — even as urbanites in Warsaw gave it less than a third of their vote.

“The elites in the city are detached from reality,” said Joszef Grochowski, 60, a lifelong village resident and mayor since 2003. “They no longer understand the needs of ordinary people.”

Populist, anti-establishment political parties are on the move in Europe. If they are far from homogeneous, these parties share common ground in their core constituencies, rural voters. Just as Donald J. Trump rolled up a big rural vote in his unexpected presidential victory, Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against urban residents viewed as elites.

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