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!
How to defeat populism – IV
This is the fourth and last in a mini-series of posts about how to beat populism at the polls. The first post emphasized the availability of a liberal leader, the second post stressed the need of establishing the leader’s authority over a party, and the third post was about the requirement of a credible and realistic policy agenda that would benefit the broader middle classes. This post suggests that the liberal leader utilizes a moderate discourse, aims at achieving political compromise, and defends institutional legality. As with the previous posts, the empirical case analyzed is contemporary Greece, and especially the more recent defeat of left populist SYRIZA by the liberal right-of-center party of New Democracy (ND) led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis. It bears repetition, Greece’s lessons are perfectly portable! So, if you’re interested in the forthcoming presidential elections in the US, please take note.
4/4 RHETORIC, CONSENSUS-BUILDING, INSTITUTIONAL LEGALITY
Throughout the opposition years, Mitsotakis was consistent in using a moderate political discourse which, on the one hand, emphasized the need to reinvigorate Greece’s damaged liberal institutions while, on the other hand, worked toward consensus-building and political compromise. To those ends, and in sharp contrast to the populists’ polarizing motto of “either Them or Us,” Mitsotakis offered a vision of national unity in which the government should not work for “the many [hoi polloi] but for all Greeks [holloi].” Above all, he sought to create an electoral majority consisting largely of entrepreneurial middle-class ordinary people to whom he proposed a sensible policy agenda centered on four issues of general concern: economic growth, public security, state functionality, and halting Greece’s human drain that continued unabated for over a decade.
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.
Populism trivia: When did you first hear about populism defined as “democratic illiberalism” (even before Viktor Orbán made this definition popular)?
Well, definitely NOT in Fareed Zakaria’s “Rise of illiberal democracy.”
The first time that populism was conceptualized and defined simply as “democratic illiberalism” was in this paper, published online in FirstView in July 2013. Interestingly, the subject matter of the paper was a longitudinal comparative analysis of the two countries which, back in the early 2010s, already seemed like exemplars of populism, Greece of its leftist variant, Hungary of a rightist one. [For the record, one of the reviewers rejected the article because (a) the definition was “unconventional” and (b) the comparison of the two countries seemed rather outlandish.]
At the time, I presented the ideas in the paper in a few places and occasions. In one such place, there was an academic and (as I would learn later) close friend of Viktor Orbán who approached me after the presentation for the usual after-event little talk. He was a pleasant old fellow and, as I distinctly remember, he was impressed by my definition of populism. The paper was published in print in early 2014. In the summer of the same year, Orbán would make ripples world-wide with his famous speech about turning Hungary into an “illiberal democratic” state.
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.
Greece, September 2018
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.
Continue reading “The causes of populism”POPULISTS IN POWER
Published in Journal of Democracy 30:2 (April 2019), 70-84 https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/populists-in-power/
The “populist rule diamond”