Italy – Takis S Pappas

September 23, 2022September 25, 2022

Italy, Europe’s political laboratory

Originally published as an op-ed in Greek newspaper Kathimerini, 30 August 2022.

History often plays strange games. Take Italy, for example. Exactly one hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the so-called Brothers of Italy – a new party with roots in postwar fascism – look set to be the winner of the Italian elections to be held on September 25. In that case, the Brothers will almost certainly form a government with the right-wing parties of Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi. Italy will not suddenly turn fascist, of course. It will however continue to both flounder about in conditions of political instability and fret about its dire economic prospects.

September 23, 2022September 25, 2022

Ιταλία, πολιτικό εργαστήριο της Ευρώπης

Δημοσιεύτηκε στην Καθημερινή της Κυριακής 31 Αυγούστου 2022

Η ιστορία παίζει παράξενα παιχνίδια. Δείτε την Ιταλία. Aκριβώς εκατό χρόνια μετά την περίφημη “πορεία προς τη Ρώμη” του Μουσολίνι, ένα νεότερο κόμμα με ρίζες στον μεταπολεμικό φασισμό, οι λεγόμενοι Αδελφοί Ιταλοί, φαίνεται ότι θα είναι ο νικητής των ιταλικών εκλογών που θα γίνουν στις 25 Σεπτεμβρίου. Στη συνέχεια, είναι σχεδόν βέβαιο ότι οι Αδελφοί θα σχηματίσουν κυβέρνηση με τα επίσης δεξιά κόμματα των Ματέο Σαλβίνι και Σίλβιο Μπερλουσκόνι. Βέβαια, η Ιταλία δεν θα γίνει ξάφνου φασιστική. Θα συνεχίσει ωστόσο να παραδέρνει σε συνθήκες πολιτικής αστάθειας, ατενίζοντας το πολιτικό της μέλλον με τεράστια αβεβαιότητα και ελάχιστη αισιοδοξία.

February 5, 2022March 11, 2022

I, the People

When I was still a full-time academic, I wrote an article titled “Populists in Power,” which was published in the Journal of Democracy in April 2019. At around the same time, my book entitled Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis also came out by Oxford UP. In both works, I painstakingly analyzed in comparative perspective the most important cases of populist parties/leaders that have enjoyed power in their respective countries. Those countries are, in order of chronological appearance of the populist forces, Argentina, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Greece, and the United States. Based on that academic analysis, and aided by a fantastic cartoonist, I decided to condense everything in a very short comic story, combining fictional and real characters. As you will notice (but also see References below), most of the dialogues are direct quotations from speeches or other public utterances by well-known populist leaders. If you enjoyed this blog, you may also want to browse through this slide show.

February 5, 2022February 6, 2022

What happens when populism wins power?

Many people think that, when in power, populism is a “corrective” to democracy. This view is theoretically naive at best and empirically fictitious at worst. Just look at the most important real-life cases of ruling populism and you have a most clear answer to this blog’s title question: When populists win power, liberal democracies turn into illiberal ones; some even turn into real autocracies. Here below are six cartoons depicting, in chronological and historical order, the important cases of populist rule in Argentina, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Greece, and the United States under Donald Trump. All six cases have been analyzed and explained in separate chapters in my book Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (OUP, 2019). As of the cartoons below, these are part of a little comic story I wrote in collaboration with cartoonist Alecos Papadatos, which you can find—and probably enjoy—here and, as a slide show, here.

October 25, 2021February 6, 2022

Europe was once a club of liberal democracies. Not any longer!

Following the expansion of EU over the last seventy years, this infographic depicts the evolution, and relative decline, of Europe’s post-war liberal democratic rule. Back in the 1950s, and for three decades thereafter, all member states had solid liberal democratic governments. The Union was in fact meant to be an exclusive club of liberal democracies. But things did not turn exactly that way. Already by the 1980s, populism, an amalgam of democracy and illiberalism (hence, minimally defined as democratic illiberalism), won power in Greece and then flourished elsewhere, particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the continent. During and after the 1990s, nativist parties—those standing in opposition to migration, further European integration, and globalization—grew strong in most developed countries in western and northern Europe. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe—because of national and ethnic divisions, persisting state corruption, or both—most countries have failed to this date to produce solid and durable liberal democratic governments; instead, as shown by the four CEE countries included herein, most governments in this region stand today as exemplars of democratic illiberalism.

March 27, 2021May 17, 2022

A Typology of Parties in Contemporary Europe, 1990-2020

This infographic presents an original typology of political parties in contemporary Europe during the last three decades. It differentiates between seven clearly defined types of parties that are exclusive to each other while collectively including all currently significant parties. The seven party types are: Liberal, populist, nativist, nationalist, regionalist, secessionist, and antidemocratic. The infographic is interactive. If downloaded, you may click on the party acronyms and visit their respective official web pages for more information. Enjoy your exploration to Europe’s ever-changing party and party system landscapes; get your concepts and definitions right; learn how to differentiate populist from non-populist parties (in a per genus et differentiam way); puzzle out how governments are formed; and get a hands-on understanding of your own about the dynamics currently developing, as well as the directions European liberal politics is likely to take in the future.

To download the full infographic, interact with it, and even print it in high-quality and professional form, click on the button below.

Europe’s Parties: A TypologyDownload

April 5, 2020May 31, 2020

The politics of pandemic prevention in Spain and Greece

All countries will suffer. But countries with inefficient governments will suffer more than others

This blog post has featured in Libertad Digital (Spain), LIFO (Greece), European Pravda (Ukraine), Bloomberg Views (USA), The TOC (Greece), Nius Diario (Spain), iefimerida (Greece), Ta Nea (Greece), The Globe and Mail (Canada), South EU Summit (Italy), Information (Denmark), Capital (Bulgaria)

When the covid-19 pandemic broke out in Europe, no government had any experience of how to face it and each tried to weather the storm in its own ways. Some governments fared better, some less so. By and large, there are three major factors that have determined, and still do, how governments cope with the virus. These are, first, the resoluteness and efficiency of their leadership; second, the capacity of states and public health systems in particular to deal with such an extraordinary health crisis situation; and, third, the cooperation of national publics in following emergency rules. At a more specific level, as shown by an even cursory comparison of the Spanish and Greek experiences with the pandemic, it seems that a well-integrated and liberal government performs significantly better than one which is disunited and, moreover, diluted with populists. Let’s have a closer look at the two cases.

At the time of this writing (5 April 2020), Spain has close to 130,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus victims and about 12,000 deaths. At the same time, Greece has about 1,700 confirmed cases and 68 deaths. So, the question is: Why these two Mediterranean countries, whose people are equally sun-loving, bar-hopping, and intensely social, and which should have drawn the same lessons from Italy’s preceding experience, have had such different fates during the early phase of the coronavirus crisis? The answer is simple, almost mundane: Different governments!

Continue reading “The politics of pandemic prevention in Spain and Greece”

January 7, 2020April 12, 2020

How to defeat populism – III

This is the third 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 while the second post we stressed the need of establishing the leader’s authority over a party. This post is about the third requirement for beating populism, namely, a coherent and realistic policy agenda that will serve the interests of the middle classes in society without damaging the liberal institutions. As before, the empirical case study from which we draw theoretical lessons comes from the recent trouncing of Greece’s left populist SYRIZA by the liberal right-of-center party of New Democracy (ND) led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Let me however repeat: Greece’s lessons are perfectly portable! So, if you’re interested in the forthcoming presidential elections in the US, please take note.

3/4 THE POLICY AGENDA

Given that populism in power is an illiberal, socially divisive, and politically polarizing project, which also depends heavily on the selective distribution of state-related resources to friends and the penalization of foes, liberalism in opposition should aim at the exact opposite – namely, put forward a political project that would benefit the middle classes, who also constitute the vast majority of the national electorate.

Continue reading “How to defeat populism – III”

December 12, 2019December 21, 2019

What did Fareed Zakaria have in mind when he wrote about “illiberal democracies,” and why “his” cases aren’t similar to Orbán’s populist democracy?

Published under the title “Dealing with modern illiberal democracies: From vintage electoral autocracy to today’s jumble of populism with nativism” in Arne Muis and Lars van Troost (eds), Will Human Rights Survive Illiberal Democracy? (Amsterdam: Amnesty International Strategic Studies, 2018), pp. 25-30.

“In the beginning was the Word,” proclaims the Gospel of John, and we should probably take that statement more seriously than we often do. Especially when the talk is about nothing less than the future of contemporary liberal democracy. For, if you really agree with me that liberal democratic politics is currently at risk, and must be rescued, we have first to agree on the nature of the threat to our democracies before we are in a position to propose solutions. As is often the case, then, we must begin by revisiting some of the wisdom received at more politically innocent times.

Continue reading “What did Fareed Zakaria have in mind when he wrote about “illiberal democracies,” and why “his” cases aren’t similar to Orbán’s populist democracy?”

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.