The rise of populism

A com­plex con­cept

The dic­tio­nary de­f­i­n­i­tion of pop­ulism is a po­lit­i­cal move­ment that mo­bilises the pop­u­la­tion against in­sti­tu­tions or gov­ern­ment, usu­ally in de­fence of an un­der­dog. Yet, the de­f­i­n­i­tion is wide and al­lows for other de­scrip­tions: “Pop­ulism, fun­da­men­tally and to sim­plify, is a dis­course that crit­i­cises the po­lit­i­cal, eco­nomic and so­cial elites and ac­cuses them of hi­jack­ing so­cial and po­lit­i­cal rights, of cor­rup­tion... of just about every­thing wrong with so­ci­ety. So we could say it is a type of dis­course that can be adopted by the right or the left,” says doc­tor in con­tem­po­rary his­tory at Barcelona Uni­ver­sity, Xavier Casals.

“Sim­pli­fy­ing,” he in­sists, “left wing pop­ulist forces de­clare them­selves to be the true rep­re­sen­ta­tives of every­thing we call the peo­ple, while for the right the anti-elit­ist dis­course is sub­or­di­nate to xeno­pho­bia, which is to say, they con­sider the elites to be trai­tors be­cause they fos­ter mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, im­mi­gra­tion, supra­na­tional mod­els....”

Ac­cord­ing to Casals, three fac­tors have co­in­cided to favour the emer­gence of pop­ulist move­ments: the tired­ness of the po­lit­i­cal sys­tems in­stalled in the mid-20th cen­tury post­war pe­riod, the fi­nan­cial cri­sis and, above all, a great cat­a­lyst for the frus­tra­tions, the ef­fects of glob­al­i­sa­tion, which has cre­ated dif­fer­ent eco­nomic, ge­o­graph­i­cal and po­lit­i­cal frac­tures.

“There are po­lit­i­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween the sys­tem's sup­port­ers and de­trac­tors, eco­nomic dif­fer­ences be­tween the win­ners and losers, and ge­o­graph­i­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween the places that have a global and dy­namic econ­omy and the places beset by the un­cer­tainty,” points out Casals.

Eu­roscep­ti­cism

Doc­tor Maria Mut, pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­tat In­ter­na­cional Catalunya and a re­searcher at the School of Ad­vanced Study at the Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don, says that to con­tex­tu­alise the rise of pop­ulism in the Eu­ro­pean Union the fact that Eu­roscep­ti­cism is gain­ing sup­port­ers at an alarm­ing rate must be taken into con­sid­er­a­tion: “Apart from the United King­dom, which is a ge­net­i­cally Eu­roscep­tic coun­try, the rest of the mem­ber states are also ex­pe­ri­enc­ing it to a greater or lesser ex­tent. In Spain, a tra­di­tion­ally more Eu­rophile state, lack of con­fi­dence in the EU is gain­ing sup­port­ers and pop­u­lar sup­port has in­creased for cer­tain po­lit­i­cal forces that we could de­fine as Eu­ro­pho­bic,” she says.

The rea­sons for Eu­roscep­ti­cism are di­verse: the in­ef­fi­ciency and lack of em­pa­thy of the po­lit­i­cal classes in man­ag­ing an overly tech­ni­cal model, a lack of real democ­racy and a dis­tance from the gen­eral pub­lic, and a pro­ject that in­creas­ingly fails to in­spire or in­te­grate. “I often ask my­self what hap­pened to the orig­i­nal Eu­ro­pean pro­ject of sol­i­dar­ity that Jean Mon­net and Robert Schu­man came up with. It is a pro­ject that many of us based our dreams on and which nu­mer­ous gen­er­a­tions tried hard to make a re­al­ity,” she adds.

Re­gard­ing the gen­eral rise in pop­ulism in Eu­rope Mut puts it down to es­tab­lished in­sti­tu­tions being per­ceived as ob­so­lete and in­flex­i­ble: “The model needs re­think­ing to make it more at­trac­tive and in­clu­sive to the pub­lic,” she says. As for the re­cent aus­ter­ity poli­cies, they have helped to win sup­port­ers for these move­ments, and Mut adds that the econ­omy can­not be the only el­e­ment to take into con­sid­er­a­tion when it comes to mak­ing de­ci­sions. “Just as dan­ger­ous as the eco­nomic cri­sis is the cri­sis of val­ues; we have to fight self­ish­ness, cor­rupt and abu­sive be­hav­iour, su­per­fi­cial­ity and so­cial im­ma­tu­rity,” she con­cludes.

How­ever, the pro­fes­sor says that ad­dress­ing the sit­u­a­tion is not only the re­spon­si­bil­ity of politi­cians, “we cit­i­zens also have our own re­spon­si­bil­i­ties; on nu­mer­ous oc­ca­sions we make huge de­mands on our po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives and yet are in­ca­pable of doing it for our­selves,” she in­sists. As she points out, a democ­racy recog­nises and guar­an­tees cer­tain rights for all of us, but we also have a se­ries of oblig­a­tions: “We have the oblig­a­tion to re­main a ma­ture so­ci­ety, one that is well-ed­u­cated and in­formed, and to main­tain a con­struc­tively crit­i­cal at­ti­tude that re­jects pre­vail­ing rel­a­tivism,” says Mut, who thinks a fully de­mo­c­ra­tic so­ci­ety should have a media ca­pa­ble of guar­an­tee­ing a range of in­de­pen­dent of opin­ions. “We have to stay away from po­lit­i­cal in­doc­tri­na­tion. In­for­ma­tion has to be dif­fused in as neu­tral and im­par­tial a way as pos­si­ble, dif­fer­ent po­si­tions on a par­tic­u­lar issue have to be ac­com­mo­dated and all the op­tions must be borne in mind, both ma­jor­ity and mi­nor­ity.”

Un­cer­tain fu­ture

In this key year for pop­ulist move­ments, what 2016 showed us that the fu­ture can­not be taken for granted and good judge­ment must pre­vail when it mak­ing fore­casts. Casals cites the ex­am­ple of France. Be­fore the vic­tory of François Fil­lon in the pri­maries of the right, every­one as­sumed that Ma­rine Le Pen would get through to the sec­ond round of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions this year. Now it is not so clear, be­cause Fil­lon could take a great many votes off her. “In other words, po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions are very volatile,” Casals in­sists.

What can be said for sure is that the dis­course of the pop­ulist right will in­creas­ingly move to the cen­tre and will reach ever more peo­ple. “It was the dis­course used in 2016 by two pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, one in the United States and the other in Aus­tria. Don­ald Trump won and Nor­bert Hofer came close. There­fore, this dis­course that has been mar­ginal for 25 years is now gain­ing im­por­tance and re­spectabil­ity. That is why there must be cau­tion about mak­ing pre­dic­tions. Po­lit­i­cal sys­tems are chang­ing and the elec­torate is show­ing that it is greatly mis­aligned,” he con­cludes.