The ascent of Nigel Farage's right-wing populist party continues into the next round. Even before the final local election results came in, Nigel Farage stated triumphantly: “We are not just a protest party. People vote UKIP because of what we stand for." The right-wing populist “United Kingdom Independence Party” won 23 % of the vote in local council elections in England this week. The big losers were the governing coalition parties, the Tories and the LibDems. Labour won some seats – but most of the protest votes went to UKIP.

The unstoppable ascent of Nigel Farage thus continues. The jovial ex-commodities trader took UKIP over in 2006. His father worked in the City too – and both men are fond of a drink. The 49-year-old Farage likes to rub shoulders in pubs with potential voters, while calling for a halt to immigration. A successful model, it seems. And these elections were only the beginning. In the EU parliament elections next year, which use a system of proportional representation that favours smaller parties, UKIP could become the strongest party. The Eurosceptics now hold 11 of Britain's 73 Euro seats. There is more to come: in 2015's national parliamentary elections, UKIP could turn into the decisive third force after Labour and the Tories, replacing the totally discredited centrist LibDems. Today, UKIP has no MPs in the House of Commons.

David Cameron must hate the results. The Conservative prime minister tried to outsmart UKIP supporters by offering voters a referendum after the next election on the possible exit of Britain from the EU. His gambit failed. UKIP, which wants an immediate British exit, instead won even more popularity. Nigel Farage told the press: “There is no cooperation with the Conservatives. There is only war.”

Labour's leader similarly has little reason to smile. The main opposition party did successfully defend the parliamentary constituency of South Shields. Ed Miliband’s brother David recently vacated the seat to head a big charity in the United States. Labour held onto the seat in the by-election. But if UKIP wins the EU elections next year, Miliband will find it difficult to stick with his moderate views on Europe, and might be forced to call for a EU referendum too.

Europe therefore needs to worry. The economic crisis in the euro zone and in Great Britain has created real poverty. The “EU bureaucracy” is an easy scapegoat. The danger that Britons will vote to exit the EU in an eventual referendum is real: “The founding thought of the European Union after the Second World War is less and less interesting for the younger generations. Even the memory of the Cold War is already fading”, says Lord Peter Mandelson, formerly an influential Labour politician and EU commissioner. Mandelson is trying to bolster the pro-European camp in London. At a lunch with foreign correspondents, he attacked David Cameron’s strategy: “It is ludicrous to call for an EU referendum at a time of chaos in Europe.”

The real losers of the UKIP victory, however, are the British themselves. UKIP has everything that right-wing populist movements everywhere else in Europe have offered for decades already: hatred of immigrants, europhobia and a messy economic programme. (Farage decided recently not to call for a flat tax of about 25 % - after some of his potential voters explained to him that this rate would be too high for the poor. Now he is considering a two-tier system. But he has not decided yet and a complete party programme still does not exist.) UKIP’s xenophobic ideology is in every respect wrong for the island nation: Britain profits greatly from access to the European single market of 500 million people. And immigrants are immensely important as innovators in a constitutional monarchy, which is stifled by too much tradition and class-based thinking

n top of the ideological weaknesses, Farage faces another problem which is typical for a fast-growing populist party: The candidates whom he recruited fast and furiously to contest all those council elections are often either right-wing radicals or simply stupid. 22-year-old Alex Wood, a candidate in Somerset, was pictured doing a Hitler salute. (Farage had to suspend him. Wood claimed he only raised his right arm to snatch the telephone from his friend.) With the ascent of UKIP, Great Britain might see a political earthquake: for the first time since the war, the country could see a four-party system after 2015. That would be not a bad outcome in principle.

But UKIP goes hunting in Tory territory. The “Spectator” magazine did some research in Westminster and claims: “More than a handful of Tory MPs, including one senior backbencher, privately admit that they’ll vote UKIP in 2014 to try to push their party in a more Eurosceptic direction.” The upper house of Westminister is already falling under the spell of UKIP’s xenophobic slogans: three Lords are already members of UKIP. They defected from the Tories.

Most advisers will tell Cameron now that the only way to defeat UKIP is to pander more to the disgruntled impoverished middle and working classes by being even more anti-European and anti-immigrant, but also less elitist. The risk is high. There is a lesson to learn here, for once, from the European continent: the ascent of right-wing populist parties like the Austrian FPÖ was not halted by the big old conservative and social democratic parties moving to the right and trying to be better racists or eurosceptics. What ends the attractiveness of populist parties to voters is something very simple, if very scary: to be included in government.