Power to the people?

Is pop­ulism good or bad? De­spite its largely neg­a­tive over­tones, it must have some­thing going for it to at­tract in­creas­ingly large num­bers of vot­ers all over Eu­rope and the world. While today's pop­ulist move­ments pro­vide a nat­ural home for many xeno­phobes, Is­lama­phobes and oth­ers with ex­treme at­ti­tudes most of us would not iden­tify with, I find it hard to be­lieve the many thou­sands at­tracted to these move­ments are all racist scum who want to res­ur­rect the gulag sys­tem. By de­f­i­n­i­tion, pop­ulism ap­peals to the peo­ple, and deals with is­sues that con­cern the pub­lic in a gen­eral sense, es­pe­cially when that pub­lic has lost faith in a po­lit­i­cal sys­tem that has ei­ther been un­able to ad­dress these con­cerns ef­fec­tively or even ac­tively works against their most basic in­ter­ests.

As the pro­fes­sor of EU and in­ter­na­tional law, Maria Mut, points out in an in­ter­view on pages 22 and 23 of this issue of the mag­a­zine, pop­ulism can put a spot­light on, for ex­am­ple, im­por­tant is­sues that tra­di­tional par­ties would rather ig­nore. It is also a way of putting le­git­i­mate de­mo­c­ra­tic pres­sure on par­ties wal­low­ing in a po­lit­i­cal com­fort zone. To ex­plore some of these as­pects of a po­lit­i­cal ten­dency that ap­pears to be gath­er­ing steam right now, this month we bring you a 10-page fea­ture on the phe­nom­e­non. Apart from lay­ing out the views of ex­perts in the mat­ter, the re­port fo­cuses on some of the most re­cent ex­am­ples of pop­ulist move­ments around the world, from Brexit to Trump, in an ef­fort to, at the very least, get us think­ing about the mat­ter. If you haven't done so al­ready, check it out and don't for­get to let us know your thoughts.

For my­self, I am as prob­a­bly un­de­cided about what the rise in pop­ulism means as you are. On the one hand, it is great to see peo­ple of all stripes par­tic­i­pat­ing and seek­ing po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tions to their very real con­cerns. The rad­i­cal in me also re­sponds to the idea of sweep­ing away out­moded and in­ef­fec­tive po­lit­i­cal sys­tems in­her­ited from a world that is quickly dis­ap­pear­ing with the rise of such things as glob­al­i­sa­tion and the In­ter­net.

How­ever, at the same time, pop­ulism is more than a bit scary. While it does a good job in high­light­ing what needs to change, it's a bit sketchy on pro­vid­ing con­vinc­ing so­lu­tions. Pop­ulist move­ments also seem to be em­i­nently vul­ner­a­ble to the ma­nip­u­la­tion and con­trol of un­scrupu­lous ex­trem­ists more than will­ing to ride a wave of pop­u­lar dis­con­tent in order to achieve enough power to im­ple­ment their own agen­das that are sim­ply going to make mat­ters worse in the long run.