Polakow-Suransky has offered well-researched book about the populist trend in Western Democracies, especially in the wake of the refugee crises in Europe in 2015-16, and has analyzed how this phenomenon affected the French national elections afterwards. I was impressed by the author's avoidance of political rhetoric to determine the motivations of the electorate and how populists take advantage of their fears. It's a dense read, but very much worth the time to understand this complex subject.

Go Back to Where You Came From has a lot packed into its 350 pages. First and foremost, it charts the refugee crisis from Syria and other conflicts and how the surge in refugees has given rise to populist parties such as The National Front in France, Danish People’s Party in Denmark and The Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and even Donald Trump in the United States just to name a few. These parties/politicians are blending anti-immigrant rhetoric with economic based appeals to working class voters to siphon votes away from mainstream parties and shake up governments throughout the globe.

That is nothing that hasn’t been put out before. Where this book differs is that it goes into the broader implications for democratic governance. As these far right parties/politicians gain seats, mainstream political parties adapt in an attempt to win back the voters that they have lost. In order to do this however, they end up adopting harsher immigration policies and rhetoric (Australia is profiled in depth as an example.) Taken to a point of extreme, this leads societies to become illiberal and undemocratic.

Equally damning of both the political left and political right in their treatment of and rhetoric regarding refugees and serving as a political wakeup call to the “political establishment” to open up their eyes and understand the conditions and circumstances that have made these anti immigrant and/or outsider voices, so appealing to some.

I wish that this book was just hyperbole and extremism at its worst, but it is not. This is an excellent, and thorough examination of how our current political climate has came to be. Issues we are facing her in the United States are also prevalent across the globe. The process from which this current political climate was created has been brewing for some time, and at this present trajectory, this ascension will not subside anytime soon. If you only read a few pages of this book, make them the first few pages of the epilogue, which creates the simplest explanation of how Donald Trump gained so much popularity, and was able to win the 2016 presidential election.