The case about Hungary

March 31, 2020April 9, 2020

The case about Hungary

As of today, 31 March 2020, Hungary is no longer a democratic country. This raises at least four major questions in search for answers. Let’s give it a try based on previous research I have produced on this topic (you may follow the links provided).

What did happen in Hungary yesterday?

On Monday, 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament voted by a two-thirds supermajority to hand over its legislative powers to prime minister Viktor Orbán allowing him to rule by decree without a set time limit. The pretext was taking emergency measures to address the coronavirus crisis; but the real aim, and final result, was the death of democracy in an EU country. For, at bottom, Hungary’s parliamentary democracy is now officially dead. Continue reading “The case about Hungary”

January 22, 2020February 2, 2020

Alexis Tsipras as leftist populist leader: A photoblog

This photoblog is based on a PowerPoint sequence of visuals with short captions, put together while I was writing a little op-ed, in Greek, on Tsipras’s leftist populist leadership during Greece’s decade of crisis. The op-ed was published in Kathimerini.

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January 18, 2020January 25, 2020

The family album of the most important postwar populist rulers in Europe and the Americas

Who are the significant illiberal leaders who have ruled, and in several cases still rule, in the lands of populism? Here’s the complete postwar populist family album in Europe and the Americas. With the exception of the recent cases of Poland, Mexico and (arguably) Bolsonaro’s Brazil, all other populist leader cases are examined in depth and compared to each other in my book on Populism and Liberal Democracy. Enjoy the show!

ARGENTINA

Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Continue reading “The family album of the most important postwar populist rulers in Europe and the Americas”

January 6, 2020January 8, 2020

How to defeat populism – II

This is the second in a mini-series of posts about how to beat populism at the polls. In the first post we emphasized the availability of a liberal leader who, as we have already seen in a third post, must credibly propose a realistic policy agenda. Unfortunately, not that many such cases from the real world of modern and contemporary politics exist. Perhaps the most significant of them are the defeat of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi by a coalition of liberal forces in 2013 and the electoral defeat of Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner by Mauricio Macri in 2015. Yet, more recently, Greece’s left/right populist government was trounced in repeated elections during 2019 by the liberal right-of-center party of New Democracy (ND) led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis. This series of posts learns from, and is primarily based on, Greece’s recent experience. But such lessons are perfectly portable! So, if you’re interested in the forthcoming presidential elections in the US, please take note.

2/4 LEADER ESTABLISHES AUTHORITY OVER PARTY

By late 2015, having already suffered bitter defeats by the populist forces, opposition center-right ND had to make a hard choice: either compromise with illiberal politics or completely break with it and adopt a fully liberal stance. This was settled unequivocally in January 2016, when the party chose as its new leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a 47-year old reformist technocrat and scion of one of Greece’s most significant political families, over Vangelis Meïmarakis, a stalwart supporter of traditional politics.

Continue reading “How to defeat populism – II”

January 5, 2020January 9, 2020

How to defeat populism – I

Beginning with this article, originally published in October 2018 in the European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog in LSE, I am presenting a mini-series of four short posts about how populism can be defeated at the polls. As this first piece indicates, it all starts with the availability of a liberal-minded leader with a realistic political and policy plan. Which, alas, is far from easy to get. It is also far from enough. For, as the second, third, and fourth posts in this series show, that leader must also be in control of a political party, present a coherent policy agenda, and use a moderate discourse that is respectful to the institutions of liberal democracy. To empirically demonstrate the points made, I will use the recent defeat of Greece’s populist SYRIZA by the liberal ND party led by Mitsotakis. This case offers valuable lessons for other countries in which populism is in power, particularly the United States.

1/4 LIBERAL LEADER AVAILABILITY

Democracy is undergoing a deep crisis. A number of nominal democracies have slid towards autocracy, most notably Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. Maverick politicians, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, disdain liberal institutional norms and are actively seeking to overthrow them. In the United States, Donald Trump’s presidency is playing havoc with erstwhile sacrosanct traditions and rules of state administration.

Continue reading “How to defeat populism – I”

December 10, 2019December 10, 2019

When a populist leader and populist voters meet

The populist leader says:

“Society is divided between ‘low’ and ‘high’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and the in-between rift cannot be bridged by existing institutions, and the majority of good lows will eventually carry the day.”

The populist voters hear:

“Since no ‘middle’ exists in society, you surely belong to ‘low’ and ‘good.’ And since institutions are of no help as bridges, you’d rather follow me by joining the majority forming against those institutions and their defenders.”

November 28, 2019December 3, 2019

The causes of populism

A detailed analysis of how the model of populist causality works is in my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 123-130

A TIP-OFF: The present model does not apply to nativist parties, which are often, unfortunately, and erroneously (mis)classified as “populist.” It only applies to populist parties that have emerged strong, and ruled, in the “lands of populism.”

The image featured above represents the causal model of populism qua democratic illiberalism. It is the outcome of an intricate interplay of structural conditions, quasi-rational extraordinary leaders, and political mechanisms. No factor is independent from the rest, and each factor must be examined in sequential causal logic.

November 15, 2019November 29, 2019

Ten characteristics of charismatic leadership

Originally published in RSA Journal under the title “Charm offensive: What is the allure of the charismatic leader?” August 2019

‘Charisma’ has alluring intimations, but a vague and continuously drifting significance. In its etymology, the word comes from the ancient Greek noun charis (χάρις), meaning grace or beauty. The earliest modern usage of the term is associated with Christian theology, in which charism was thought of as a special spiritual gift or power that was divinely conferred from God on a select few individuals. In Middle English, a person with karisme was someone gifted with special talents such as healing, prophecy or tongues.

The term entered the lexicon of applied politics only in the early 20th century, in the work of German sociologist Max Weber. He used it to distinguish between ‘charismatic’ and the other two types of legitimate power: ‘traditional’, where people obey because of seniority, long-established law, or custom; and ‘rational-legal’ or ‘bureaucratic’ authority (best typified by the impersonal modern state administration).