This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 24th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With recent elections in Europe, it appears populism of one sort or another is gaining ground.

How much should these events worry fans of free markets and limited government?

Alberto Mingardi is Director General of the Institute of Bruno Leone in Milan, Italy, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

We spoke about the rise of populism and anti-liberal sentiment in Europe.

It's rare for a whole lot of international news to really break through to American audiences,

but the violence in Catalonia over this independence vote certainly galvanized a lot of support for Catalonians given how it seems very

ham-fisted how the government went about dealing with this independence vote.

Can you give us some perspective from being in that region? with this in its response and this has started a few years ago actually when Catalonia has

first approved a new statute of autonomy for the region. Roy was then Prime Minister and he wanted to crack Catalonians down.

It's been his policy for quite a while.

Ruhoy, Mr Ruhoy, he is a Prime Minister that comes out of the Spanish Popular Party, so the right-wing

Christian Democrats.

And he is a very capable politician.

I mean, he has been in Parliament since the year I was born, so quite a while.

At the same time he faced a very difficult political situation.

He is clearly not, you know, one of the prime minister that may inspire a following by the masses.

It's a rather gray, rather pale figure.

His basic policy has been m through the financial crisis, which he did successfully.

He also promoted a good labor law reform that actually helps Spain in getting back on track. Now Spain is one of the few

countries in Europe that had positive growth, a growth of something like 3% a year which is clearly very good by contemporary

...