I like to think I am a cheerful fellow. But I’ve been talking to some seriously angry and disappointed people recently.

There was the chap dressed in a convict-style black and white striped suit in a demo outside Iceland’s parliament, waving a banner comparing a certain politician to a pig. There were the Greek farmers who had cut their country in two by decoratively arranging their tractors across a motorway, genially enough offering me strong drink and smoky kebabs, but full of fury talking about the failures of their government.

Then there was the mild young man in Latvia with a wispy beard, whom I had last seen in TV footage, joyously playing an accordion as the protest around him descended into riot and snowballs and sticks were hurled at police. He explained to me that the politicians in parliament were independent. He didn’t mean it in a good way: he was trying to say they had no connection with people, no care for their concerns.

Each time there are different languages, different details – but the same emotions. There is anger that politicians failed to see the financial crisis coming and failed to prevent it. But even stronger than this is the feeling that there is no leader with a map, a compass and a purpose, who can offer some hope that there is a way out of the swamp.

It was fashionable for a time last year to refer to the “financial tsunami”. It is a metaphor that appeals to me, because it seemed to me that while the headlines and airwaves were full of gloomy experts, most of us were, at that stage, spectators. The wave was indeed still looming over us, towering above the heads of ordinary folk. There was a certainty that it would crash down upon us, but it hadn’t quite done so. This year people’s lives are being washed away in earnest.

To me the big question is: what politics will come forth from this shattering of comfortable certainties, what new movements, what types of protest will emerge as the pain begins to bite?

In Latvia, a farmer whose tractor is part of a convoy aimed at bringing the city to a standstill, leans down from his cab and tells us: “I hate the ministers. They talk about us tightening our belts but the belt is around our neck. They think only of themselves.” That afternoon the minister of agriculture resigns. His fellow farmers in Greece say they are being portrayed as greedy, asking for more money, but what they want is not cash but a government with a sense of direction, with a plan for the future, for their grandchildren.

The head of the Latvian bosses’ federation is scathing about the government. She says they don’t know what to do about the banks, they haven’t thought things through, there is no vision, they don’t talk and they don’t listen. Should they resign? She shrugs and tells me the opposition are even worse.

After years of covering British politics, the idea that people fe......