Brexit explained: The latest updates and what you need to know
To understand what is driving the pro-Brexit surge in Britain, look what's happening across the continent. Mainstream parties are on the run everywhere. Voter sentiment is turning in favour of the anti- establishment parties. No wonder the anti-Brexit campaign of Mr. Establishment himself, British Prime Minister David Cameron, is backfiring.
The Great Insurrection that could remove Britain from the European Union after the June 23 in-out referendum is well under way even though the economic case for a British exit – Brexit – does not hold up.
Take Italy.
This weekend, Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, is expected to win the runoff election in Rome to become mayor of the European Union's fourth-largest city. She represents the Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party that forms the main opposition group in the national parliament, the Chamber of Deputies.
Ms. Raggi is no rarity.
Two other big Southern European cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have voted in mayors (both women, incidentally) who are backed by Podemos, the rising anti-establishment party in Spain. In France, the non-mainstream biggie is the Euroskeptic and xenophobic Front National, led by Marine Le Pen (neither Podemos nor Five Star could be considered racist).
In Germany, it is the Euroskeptic Alternative fuer Deutschland party. Having placed well in March's state parliamentary poll, AfD is suddenly a power.
The British equivalent of Le Front National is the UK Independence Party. In the United States, the populist revolt is led by Donald Trump.
Referendums are always perilous for whichever ruling party calls them. They can become an irresistible opportunity for a protest vote. So it is in Britain, apparently. If you think Mr. Cameron is an opportunistic fraud even though you can see the case for staying in the EU, you might vote for Brexit in the hope of seeing his career go up in flames.
Ditto if you think the establishment parties have betrayed you. It's not hard to guess who forms the rump of the pro-Brexit crowd. In Britain, they would be the same types of voters who support Mr. Trump, the ones who think they are the victims of globalization, free trade and the financialization of the markets.
The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent deep recessions across Europe only intensified their views. Governments (that is, the mainstream parties) utterly failed to anticipate the crisis. Their response was to spend hundreds of billions bailing out the banks – that is, rewarding the crisis's guilty parties – while imposing austerity on the masses.
Governments negotiated free-trade deals throughout the crisis (such as the Canada-Europe deal, known as CETA), just as free trade was becoming equated with job losses for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The massive quantitative easing programs launched by the European Central Bank and other central banks, designed to stimulate the economy and stoke inflation, made the rich richer by boosting the prices of financial assets, which are mostly owned by the rich.
The result was voter anger directed at the established parties. Cameron & Co. only aggravated the situation by ramping up Project Fear, the campaign to convince voters that they would face economic hell, including higher taxes, if Britain were to wave goodbye to the EU.
During the early part of the campaign, when the polls showed little chance of Brexit, the mainstream politicians did not equate Brexit with extreme economic pain.
Now that the polls are going against them, they are. No wonder voters think the economic predictions amount to threat mongering. The result is more mistrust.
Project Fear obviously has been counterproductive. The latest polls put the Brexiteers in the lead. Wheeling out old, unpopular politicians like Tony Blair, the prime minister who took Britain into the disastrous Iraq war, and his successor, Gordon Brown, who bailed out the banks during the crisis, to promote the pro-EU side has only worsened the Stay side's loss of momentum.
The banks' messages that Brexit would hurt business seem to have also done Cameron no favours. A good number of bank-hating voters must be thinking: What's bad for the banks can only be good for me, and vice versa.
The increasingly strident anti-Brexit calls from the suddenly united, political class have intensified the rebellion against the establishment in recent days. Still, the vote could go either way. The pro-EU side hopes that the large number of undecided voters will play it safe and vote to stay put.
Smart voters will ignore the predictions of economic doom peddled by the mainstream parties. Equally, they will ignore the predictions that Brexit will fully restore Britain's glorious sovereignty at little to no economic cost. The smart ones will read a bit of economic history and learn that EU membership has been a huge win for Britain since it joined in 1973. Since then, both national and per capita growth has been stronger than any of the other big EU countries, including Germany.
By now, the referendum isn't just about economics or sovereignty or kicking the regulation-made gnomes of Brussels in the butt. It's about punishing the establishment. Mr. Cameron's referendum was unnecessary and parochial, and it was badly timed – spectacularly so.