Until the 1980s, a reference to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries – the Narodniks – that were close to ‘the people’, was used by political scientists in their definition of populism, referring predominantly to various Latin American regimes (such as Vargism in Brazil and Peronism in Argentina), to the People’s Party in the USA and, eventually, to post-colonial states. In post-World War II Europe, the definition of populism was reserved for a few marginal political phenomena scattered in various countries: Poujadisme in France, Uomo Qualunque (Common Man’s Front) in Italy, Finnish Rural Party (Suomen Maaseudun puolue) and the Progress Party (Fremskridspartiet) in Denmark and Norway.
From the 1980s onwards however, a large and growing number of European movements, parties and leaders have been labelled ‘populists’. Having shifted from the academic discourse to the core of the political debate and being regularly evoked by the media as a major issue of our time, ‘populism has become popular’.1 As the Italian sociologist Ilvio Diamanti (2010: 6) writes:
Populism is one of the words that is most used in the political discourse for some time now. Without much difference, however, between the scientific environment, public, political and everyday life. Indeed, it is a fascinating concept, able to ‘suggest’ without imposing too much precise and definitive meaning. In fact, it does not define, but evokes.
Considered by many scholars as nothing more than a vague concept or, worse, a demagogic accusation used to discredit opponents (see the introduction to this book), we can wonder, with Ariana Reano (2011), how the category of populism has reappeared ‘under new aspects’, generating a new series of challenges about how to conceptualise the political landscape. As Reano (2011) suggests, looking at the category of populism today goes beyond the search for an analytical category in order to gain knowledge of the political world. The category of populism also allows us to analyse how the political world constructs itself.
Why has populism been placed at the heart of the debate on the political, economic, but also cultural perspectives of the European Union and maybe of the European continent? Why has populism become one of the main analytical categories (instead of, for example, racism, far right and neo-liberalism) in the midst of the European dilemmas between the acceptance or rejection of immigration; between the idea of the multicultural society and the one of ‘unity in diversity’; between ‘more Europe’ and the restoring of national sovereignty in the context of the EU; between different approaches to a crisis that is going far beyond the economy and is touching the very idea of democracy?
In order to understand the present, we must, however, start from the past: this chapter focuses on populism as a historically based phenomenon, which makes reference to the ideological frames that have been developed around the idea of ‘the people’ in modernity, and is embedded in the material conditions of the different societies where it appeared. This historical exercise will help us to understand the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present experiences, testing the pertinence of the present uses of the category.
In this chapter we discuss the historical conceptualisation of populism in various national contexts. Narodnichestvo, which started as an agrarian socialist movement in Russia, is contrasted with Marxites, who rejected narodnichestvo for its concept of ‘the people’, instead of that of the class. We then proceed to evaluate different conceptions of ‘the people’, both the ones inspired by the universalism of the Enlightenment, as well as those that adopted the exclusionary idea of ‘the people’ based on ethnicity. Similar to the Russian experience, the populism of the People’s Party in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century was related to peasants’ rebellion when industrial capitalism was restructuring societies. Populism emerged in Latin America in the context of modernisation; in this chapter we discuss its manifestation in the form of a political regime across Latin America, including experiences of some post-colonial countries like Egypt. We approach European populism by providing insight into the movements and parties such as Uomo Qualunque, Poujadisme and the rural parties in Northern Europe. Finally, the chapter addresses contemporary histories, by discussing attributions of populism to the far right in the present day European context.
Populism, as a historical experience, began with a radical agrarian socialist movement that, in Russia, during the second half of the nineteenth century, idealised the peasantry (narodnichestvo) in view of Tsarist absolutism. According to Pipes (1964: 445), the term populism came into use in 1875 to describe a particular attitude intellectuals should hold towards the people:
Its [of that specific radical agrarian socialist movement] adherents held that the intellectuals should not lead the people in the name of abstract, bookish, imported ideas, but adapt themselves to the people as it was, promoting resistance to the government in the name of real, everyday needs.
Similar movements appeared in the context of Central–Eastern Europe, where they reflected the peasant reforms and rebellion against the absolutist power. They were related to an idea of radical democracy as ‘rule of the people’ (Volk); the people should govern itself and not be governed by the (corrupt) elites.
The narodnichestvo movement was criticised by the Marxists, because of their economic programme: the movement hoped to preserve agrarian collectivism and avoid modernisation, without taking into account the fight against capitalism, which inevitably became the dominant economic model. The narodnichestvo suggested a ‘popular’ alternative, both to Tsarism and socialism. The Russian historian Paul Milyoukov (1895: 25) distinguishes, in fact, between two groups that were opposing Tsarism in nineteenth-century Russia:
The first group values primitive collectivism because it regards it as an inalienable trait in the character of the Russian people; and at present of course it sees in it not the immemorial peculiarity of the popular spirit, but a means for saving Russia from proletarianism. The other group derives its deductions from the teachings of Marx and Engels. The latter has adopted the title Marxites, the former sticks to its old name of ‘Populist’.
This distinction is extremely important, because it shows how, since the beginning, populism represented a non-Marxist opposition to the existing power, searching for an alternative model in some ‘popular’ characters: as agrarian collectivism, in the case of the narodnichestvo. Marxists, starting with Lenin, were quite critical of this political proposal. Outside Russia, one of the first politicians who used the term populism to describe the narodnichestvo experience was the anti-fascist progressive liberal Piero Gobetti in a 1921 article in the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order).2 Gobetti was also very critical of populism: for him, Russian populists were sentimental revolutionaries, rooted in rural archaism and without a concrete economic plan – they were examples of a primitive, ‘slavocentric’ ideology, which was, ultimately, reactionary.3
The rejection of the narodnichestvo not only by the Marxists, who used the concept of class instead of that of people, but also by the progressive liberal Gobetti is embedded in different conceptions of ‘the people’ – the term that represents the ‘essence’ of populism. Historically, populism is explained along the lines of ‘the people versus the elite’; it is connected to anti-elitism, to movements that express disappointment over the undemocratic and privileged elites and plead for democratic reform. We argue, however, that the confrontation of ‘the people’ and the elite is not sufficient to define the complex concept of populism. Since the narodnichestvo, the populist idea of ‘the people’ has been opposed to the Marxist one. In spite of the variety of political manifestations, populism never developed a universalistic idea of ‘the people’ as a world class of proletarians, as Marxists did. When populists spoke, and continue to speak, of the ‘people’, they refer to a specific people, bound to a ‘country/fatherland’ and criticise socialists and communists, because they are ‘without fatherland’ (Hernández Arregui 2004).
In the book I populismi nella crisi europea (Populisms in a Europe under Crisis), Giovanni Stanghellini (Campani and Stanghellini 2014) recalls the theoretical elaborations of the concept of ‘the people’ in modern times, especially following the French Revolution – an era in which we certainly cannot talk about populism. He adds that remembering these times can be useful to relativise the abused use of the term populism and, at the same time, to understand how certain populist phenomena have theoretical and historical roots that run far deeper than those that can be reduced to a legitimate critique of the present European ‘status quo’.
For example, a characterisation of the populist experience as the orientation of a ‘homogeneous and virtuous people’ – opposed to the elite and made up of dangerous ‘others’, whose intention is to deprive the people of their sovereign rights and values, prosperity and voice – would be a connotation that we might well use for Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution of the seventeenth century or for the French Revolution; historical experiences that certainly cannot be called populist. In spite of a strong opposition between ‘the people’ and the elite, the aim – at least at the beginning of both revolutions – was the construction of a representative democracy, through institutions such as the parliament or the assembly, against absolutism. They did not want to impose a power without ‘checks and balances’ after centuries of absolutism. Dictatorships were an unforeseen outcome of the revolutionary processes. The ‘unity of the people’ was historically evoked against the monarch, stressing the needs and rights of citizenry. The revolutions in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century were at the origin of an idea of democracy that mainly led to ‘liberal democracy – a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property’ (Zakarias 1997).
The element that differentiates populism from the historical battles against the corrupted powers conducted by ‘the people’ – under the leadership of Cromwell or of the French Revolutionaries (but we could go back even to the Florentine monk Girolamo Savonarola) – might be understood as a result of the transformation of the concept of ‘the people’ during the nineteenth century. Revolutions based on religious principles, such as those of Cromwell or Savonarola, are necessarily universalistic in their aims. The conception of ‘the people’ shared by the French Revolutionaries was inspired by the universalism of the Enlightenment; the people being potentially all the humanity, or being the guide for all the humanity. But in the early nineteenth century, German political romanticism produced a different idea of people, an expression of national particularism. With the philosopher Herder, the universalistic idea of ‘the people’, product of history, was replaced by a metaphysical idea of people, based in ethnicity: the people’s spirit (Volksgeist) is at the origin of the national language, art, religion and customs. In other terms, the character of the people is not the consequence of a historical experience; it is the metaphysical character of the people that produces the history of a country. The organic and culturalist conception of the people as something specific, static and eternal, formed around traditions, sentiments and values that was expressed by German political romanticism had a large influence not only in Germany, but also in Italy, during the Risorgimento, and all over Europe. We can say that in the ethnic idea of people, there are the embryos of aggressive nationalism that developed in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, bringing the continent towards World War I. This aggressive nationalism has been a shared character of many European nation states ruled by various forms of governments, from conservative to fascist. Gradually, populism absorbed the elements of the ethnic idea of the people. It is interesting to notice that, as Pipes (1964) remarks, the notion ‘narod’ was used in Russia and also in Central and Eastern European states as equivalent to the German notion of ‘Volk’. The accusation of ‘slavocentrism’ that Gobetti (1981) launched to the Russian populists represents a critique of the ethnic idea of people.
Populism combined the battle against the elite with the development of an explicitly ethno-exclusivist nature, ‘the people’ being presented as something unquestionable and self-evident. It appeared as a dogmatic belief that built up an exclusivist vision of ‘the people’. In this construction of the people, inclusion/exclusion in/ from ‘the people’ is naturalised, presented as a natural cause and not as a consequence of social and structural processes; ‘the people’ is simply there and no one should question it. As such ‘the people’ is projected outside of reality; something transcendent lies in ‘the people’ so that it is believed to be above differences based on class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on. The populist idea of ‘the people’ ignores diversity and conflict as consequences of the production of social inequality. The idea of ‘narod’/‘Volk’ played an important role in political dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century. The conflicts that erupted in certain regions – in particular, in the Caucasus and the Balkans in the 1989–1991 period – gave rise to populism that attempted to disentangle the causes for what was often referred to as ‘ethnic strife’, connecting the fall of communism to the rise of nationalism (Petrie and Maryniak 1997).
When populism in the Central Eastern European context is related to the rise of the nation (as ‘narod’), the distinction of ‘volkisch nationalism’ from ‘statehood nationalism’ made by Hannah Arendt (1951) becomes relevant. The former is a kind of (racist) nationalism – Tonči Kuzmanić (2005) relates it, in the context of Yugoslavia, to ‘narodnjaštvo’: a term that ascribes superpower to a ‘nation’. The examples of Milošević in Serbia, Tuđman in Croatia and Janša in Slovenia in the post-1989 period show how this extends beyond the idea of a state as a political community (polity) and can represent a base for totalitarianism. According to Kuzmanić (2005), populism as ‘volkisch nationalism’, and as a neo-conservative, managerial or neo-liberal revolution in the Balkan region, connotes a lack of state and of politics. Instead, the region has seen an establishment of quasi-states, ‘a radical volkish populist version of a non-state or even of a Volks Gemeinschaft’ (Kuzmanić 2005: 11), which does not function according to the principles of citizenship, legal equality and human rights; rather, it brings a lack of state and the absence of politics.
The organic and culturalist conception of the people is not a specificity of populism; it can also be found in fascism and neo-fascism, as we will see in the chapters on neo-Nazi and neo-fascist constellations and on post-democracy in this book. However, an organic and culturalist idea of people characterises many current European right-wing movements and parties that are labelled as populist not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Northern, Southern and Western Europe – from the Northern League to the Finns Party. They should be defined, more precisely, as ‘national populists’, for their praise of ethnic primordialism, the ‘better value’ of the ‘first comers’. Most of the forces that are labelled as ‘populists’ in today’s Europe are, in fact, ‘national populists’ (Front National, Northern League, Finns Party, etc.).
We argue that, understanding populism, with its present-day manifestations, requires a careful consideration of historical phases, different contexts across the world and philosophies and theories that preceded the contemporary conceptualisations of populism. As a matter of fact, the experience of the USA’s People’s Party at the end of the nineteenth century may appear miles from any European populism. Still, even this far-away and largely forgotten experience clarifies the linkage between populism and socio-economic structures in specific historical phases.
In the USA, after the Civil War, between 1870 and 1880, many farmers, especially in the South and the Mid-West, saw their standard of living decline, because of the fall of agricultural prices, lack of credit facilities and crop failures due to drought, and went into deep debt. Having lost trust in the mainstream parties (Republicans and Democrats), they organised in confederations called Farmers’ Alliances (National Farmers Alliance and Colorado Farmers Alliance) in order to impose their requests, such as the regulation of banks (and abolition of national banks, who were accused as responsible for their misery), unlimited coinage of silver, a working day of eight hours (the other enemy were the industrialists of the East), pensions, but also non-ownership of land by foreigners and reform of immigration regulations. In 1892, the People’s party was founded in the USA, with the goal of replacing the Democrats as the nation’s second party by forming an alliance of the farmers of the South and West with the industrial workers of the East. This attempt failed, mainly because the Democrats adopted the plank of free coinage of silver in the presidential election of 1896, while the People’s Party was unable to attract the workers of the industrial East. In the meantime, the rise in farm prices improved the economic situation of the farmers. The People’s Party started to decline.
The People’s Party’s political action ended up standing for various contradictions: it fought against the industrialisation and the modernisation of the country, represented by the industrialists of the East, attacked the banks (suggesting a different monetary policy – a topic that is also very current today) and led progressive fights, such as the political equality of ‘the black’. However, it was never able to translate all these topics into a coherent and sustainable political proposal capable to last over the years. As an example, in Georgia, during the electoral campaign of 1892, Tom Watson, who led the populist revolt against the Democratic Party, appealed to rural black voters by promising to respect their political and civil rights. Watson organised picnics and camp meetings and formed political clubs for blacks.4 The same Tom Watson, who had openly called for political equality of ‘the black’ and racial unity along class lines in the 1890s as a leader of the People’s Party, turned into a racist and anti-Semitic in the early twentieth century campaigns, when he was still running for president or senator as a representative of the vanishing People’s Party.5
At the end of the nineteenth century, the two political experiences defined as ‘populist’ – the narodnichestvo in Russia and the People’s Party in the USA – had mainly been embedded in a rural world of peasants and farmers. This was not sufficiently taken into account, neither by the socialist movements, inspired by Marxism and focusing on the proletarians as a revolutionary class, nor by liberal forces such as the USA Democrats, who mainly turned towards the interests of the industrialists or the industrial workers. Populism found its space in a historical phase of modernisation, when industrial capitalism was reshaping the structures of the countries. It is precisely during the process of modernisation that populism developed in several countries of Latin America, opening up a new chapter in its history: populism as a political regime.
The continent where populism was able to become a political regime, shaping the form of the state, is Latin America. Different Latin American countries have experienced populist regimes: Mexico, where the Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled from 1929 to 2000; Brazil, ruled by Getulio Vargas between 1930 and 1945; and Argentina, where Peronism, the political form created by Juan Peron, was in power between 1945 and 1955 and then again between 1973 and 1974 and remains – even today – the main political force in the country.6
Populist regimes in Latin America emerged in the mid-twenties of the past century – a period of great social, political and economic transformations. They represented an answer to the demands of different social classes – from the new middle classes, including the small industrial bourgeois, to the urban working class, which had been excluded from power by the previous oligarchical states and that had entered into a process of political participation. The social classes (or groups) that supported the Latin American populism were different from the ones that were behind the USA’s People’s Party; the first were mainly urban classes, the latter were rural. Their interests were also opposite – in the USA they opposed modernisation, while in Latin America they mainly wanted change. Latin American populism was, historically, a modernising force that aimed to transform economies based on agriculture and export of raw material – strongly dependent on external international capital – into industrial economies, focusing on the creation of an internal market through the stimulation of popular consumption. In this process of transformation, populist regimes considered that the role of the state was crucial in directing the economy and used nationalisation as an instrument of development. Main national resources (such as oil or energy) were nationalised in Mexico and Argentina.
The enemy of the populist regimes being the oligarchy, which in an economy dependent on international capital, as is the case for Latin America, is often bound to international interests, the popular classes are exalted through a nationalistic rhetoric that is hostile to oligarchic classes and capitalism. The populist rhetoric has another function: it hides the contradictions that exist among the interests of the different social classes that represent the political basis of the populist parties and regimes. Appealing to emotions and sentiments is not necessarily a synonym of demagoguery, but a way to overcome the fact that not all the promises can be fulfilled, given the structural basis of populists’ political support. It happens, however, that at a certain point the rhetoric becomes more important than the content. That is, in fact, an outcome of the evolution of populism in Latin America: even when the populist model of a state with a strong control over the economy was dismantled in order to embrace the neo-liberal model, the populist rhetoric remained – as the case of Carlos Menem in Argentina demonstrates.
The fact that the populist regime aimed to represent different social classes whose interests are sometimes contradictory results in the maintenance of political hegemony and power – despite these contradictions – in the hands of strong leaders: this was the case of Getulio Vargas in Brazil and of Juan Peron in Argentina.7 This is the origin of the charismatic component of populism (that was absent in the Russian experience of the Narodnichestvo and of the American People’s Party), aimed to establish a direct link between government and governed, and also of a populist trend towards authoritarianism that characterises the historical phase of Latin American populism.
Among the scholars who studied Latin American populism, Gino Germani deserves a special place. Italian-born, Germani immigrated to Argentina to flee fascism in 1934. He came back to Italy in 1976, when Argentina fell under the military dictatorship, and became professor at the University of Naples until his death in 1979. Working at the university as sociologist, he offered an interpretation of Peronism in comparison with Italian fascism. In the book Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism, Germani (1978) describes the general theory of authoritarianism in modem society and applies it to authoritarian movements and regimes likely to emerge out of the social mobilisation of the middle and lower classes together, often in the aim of promoting modernisation. He then compares European fascism and Latin American populism. Analysing the nature, conditions and determinants of authoritarianism in the context of Latin American political and social developments, Germani points out that the Latin American populist regimes were always nationalist, and they represented a sort of alliance between different social classes (urban and rural), ideologically mobilised around a leader, to modernise the countries. In an article written in 1973, Germani makes an extremely lucid clarification about the specificities of Latin American populism in respect not only of fascism, but also of liberal democracy. Germani (1973: 13) writes:
Argentine Peronism used and manipulated the popular classes, but it came to give them an effective degree of participation, even abstaining from social reforms or limiting them in a manner that was acceptable to the most powerful groups in society and the economy. Peronism presents an extraordinary theoretical interest, having been created by a group whose tendency was clearly fascist or even Nazi. However, as the situation in the country could not give them the massive support of the petty bourgeoisie who formed the basis of the European model, they had to turn to the masses formed as a consequence of the great internal migrations. But this meant more than a simple change of terminology, myths and ideology, a mere replacement of the words ‘order, discipline, hierarchy’ with ‘social justice’ or ‘Descamizados regime’. What happened had reciprocal effects. Peronism was different from fascism precisely in the essential fact that it was forced to tolerate some effective participation, albeit limited, of the popular classes, to get their support.
Germani then describes the forms of popular participation in Peronism: they are different from the mechanisms of representative democracy, based on individual rights, free press, parties’ organisations, but also from the bureaucratised and canalised model of the communist countries. It is a form of participation characterised by a certain spontaneity and the exercise of an effective freedom, in spite of the practices of patronage by local representatives of Peronism. It is precisely around this idea of a spontaneous participation – exercising an effective freedom – that a progressive understanding of populism can be developed, as a particular organising principle, inherent to certain enhancements of popular mobilisations. This progressive understanding of populism has been developed, particularly by the Argentinian scholar Ernesto Laclau (2005) in The Populist Reason, as we will see later.
The populist regimes of Latin America were characterised by a combination of inter-classism, nationalist rhetoric, permanent plebiscite and direct relationship between the masses and the leaders, in opposition to representative democracy. These characteristics also appeared in the political regimes of various countries in the post-colonial period, like Egypt (Gamal Abdel Nasser) or Indonesia (Suharto). In the article ‘The Metamorphosis of Populism in the Arab World: Gamal Abdel Nasser’, Cristina Nedelcu (2014) analyses how Nasser introduced a new model of legitimacy in the Arab world: he proposed a new relationship between the leader and the people through a rhetoric discourse, engaging at the same time in the task of modernising the country (fulfilling the interests of the people) against an oligarchic elite.
If we exclude the French ‘Boulangism’8 of the nineteenth century – the movement of General Boulanger that was able to seduce nationalists and socialists in the name of ‘the people’ – the most significant European experiences labelled as populist emerged in the second post-war period. They refer to parties that remained marginal in the political landscape and never reached power. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, two similar experiences appeared in Italy and in France and have brilliant, but ephemeral, success: the Uomo Qualunque of Guglielmo Giannini and Poujadisme of Pierre Poujade.
Starting with a newspaper of the same name, Uomo Qualunque, founded in Rome in 1944 after its liberation, the movement wanted to represent the ‘man on the street’ – the common, ordinary man – in respect to the mainstream parties: Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists. Its agenda was in favour of a small state, against the professionalism of politicians and against taxes. The movement lasted for only two years, incorporated, at its conclusion, into all areas of Italian politics, mainly on the right, the great Catholic centre or the liberals. This short trajectory can be explained by the peculiar context of the post-war period: the Uomo Qualunque, in fact, wanted to give voice to the ‘profound Italy’ that had not taken part in the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists (that some historians consider a sort of ‘civil war’). They did not engage in the conflict, because they preferred to wait to see how it would go and felt, eventually, cheated by history, the banks, the parties, those in government and both fascism and anti-fascism. Even if it opposed fascism, because of its opposition to the state taking on a strong role, the Uomo Qualunque of Guglielmo Giannini represented an area of hostility to democracy, with accents that recalled the fascist ideology in its opposition to the democratic political class. Even if the experience was short-lived, it left a legacy to the political lexicon – an Italian term, ‘qualunquismo’, that is synonymous with a relatively benevolent judgment towards fascism and anti-political hostility to the democratic system. These two aspects can be considered the roots of the future Italian populism.
In France, in 1953, Pierre Poujade founded the movement Union de defence des marchands, des commerçants et des artisans (UDCA), which he considered endangered by the development of hypermarkets in France. The new movement expanded from the area where it started, the Lot, throughout France and, under the label of Union and French Fraternity (UFF), got more than two million votes and fifty-two MPs (or 12 per cent) at the 1956 elections. The party was hostile to the Treaty of Rome and the removal of tax controls and was for the defence of small merchants. Intellectuals were often denigrated in favour of common sense, which was supposed to be a quality of the ‘little people’. The UFF group was also a loyal supporter of French Algeria. The movement disappeared almost completely with the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. All deputies elected under the Poujadist banner in 1956 were not re-elected in the French elections of 1958 except for two, one of whom was Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had left the movement.
The similarities between the Uomo Qualunque and Poujadisme appear to be in the emphasis on the dichotomy between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, as well as in the battle against taxes. Both movements were able to mobilise the middle classes destabilised by the processes of change in the post-war period.
Among the populist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, some Scandinavian experiences are particularly pronounced: that of the Finnish Rural Party in Finland, which is embedded in the rural tradition, and that of the Progress Party, active in both Denmark and Norway, whose political discourse was mainly focused on taxes.
The Finnish Rural Party (Suomen Maaseudun puolue, SMP in Finnish; Finlands landsbygdsparti, FLP in Swedish) was a Finnish populist political party that started as a faction of the Agrarian League in 1959. The party was identified with Veikko Vennamo, a former Agrarian League member of parliament known for his opposition to the politics of President Urho Kekkonen. Vennamo was chairman of the Finnish Rural Party between 1959 and 1979.
The support for the Finnish Rural Party was at its highest in the 1970s and 1980s, with its share of the votes reaching around 10 per cent in some parliamentary elections. In the 1990s, the party fell into financial trouble and was discontinued in 1995. Vennamo accused the political elite in power of being corrupt and forgetting the common people. The party was largely focused on criticising the elites during times of unemployment growth, while racism and xenophobia were not yet a visible feature of the party. In public discussions, the FRP was labelled as a populist movement. It was accused of simplifying social problems and not providing viable solutions to problems and of just pointing to scapegoats. The FRP stands for a kind of populism that is characterised by the idealisation of the simple, rural life and ordinary people and that aims to return the power to the people by, for example, favouring entrepreneurs over international corporations and opposing ‘bureaucrats’ (Aitamurto 2014: 2). The Finns Party that has strengthened over the last twenty years is often seen as the successor of the Finnish Rural Party, but the context within which this new party operates has changed.
The FrP Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet in Danish), founded in 1972, was born as a tax-protest, ultra-liberal and anti-establishment party and it was a sign of the times within which the populist tax protest mobilisation in Denmark and in other Scandinavian countries (Norway in particular) was occurring, which peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s. Later, the political agenda of these parties ebbed out, but they left a political opportunity open to a rising populist demand, yet this time driven by anti-immigration and strong ethno-nationalist positions (Meret and Siim 2014: 16).
The FrP believed in radical tax cuts (including removing income tax alto-gether) and also vowed to cut government spending. An example of this was the suggestion of replacing the entire department of defence with an answering machine with the recorded message ‘we surrender’ in Russian. In the late 1970s, its agenda was the abolition of income tax, the disbandment of civil service, the abolition of the diplomatic service and the scrapping of the majority of all legislation.
In 1973, Anders Lange founded a twin party in Norway, which highly valued individual rights, supported the downsizing of bureaucracy and the acceleration of the market economy in order to reduce taxes. It also supported an increased use of the unique Norwegian Oil Fund to invest in infrastructure.
The term populism was first used by Danish scholars in the 1980s to describe and characterise the rise and development of the Danish Progress Party (Meret and Siim 2014: 12). In Denmark, the FrP entered parliament after the 1973 election landslide, where it immediately became the second largest party. After this, a gradual decrease in voter support occurred and, when some of its leading members broke away and established the Danish People’s Party (DF) in 1995, the party soon fell out of parliament. The first wave of neo-fascist parties were only marginally present in Denmark; the rise and development of the FrP belongs to the second populist wave (Von Beyme 1988). The contemporary history of the DF and the role of the party in Danish politics cannot fully be comprehended without considering the DF legacies to the FrP. The DF did not emerge from a political vacuum, but capitalised on the FrP political experience, agenda and developments.
The former uncontested DF leader, Pia Kjærsgaard, joined the FrP in 1978 and was elected party MP in 1984 (for further details, see Chapter 7). She rapidly gained a political career in the party, becoming a crucial actor in the struggle for FrP leadership. In the early 1990s, internal party divisions, disagreements and struggles for power eventually split the party up. As a result, Pia Kjærsgaard and four other FrP members left in protest in 1995 and launched the DF. At the 1998 parliamentary election, the DF received more than 7 per cent of the votes. From 2001, the party secured a decade of Liberal–Conservative government (2001–2011) supporting the minority government (Meret and Siim 2014: 18–19).
The Norwegian Progress Party became the second largest political party in Norway for the first time in the 1997 parliamentary election – a position it held following the elections in 2005 and 2009. The other parties in parliament have historically refused any formal governmental cooperation with the Progress Party. However, after a long period of work linked to the right wing in Norway, the Progress Party joined the Progress/Conservative coalition and, as of 16 October 2013, is one of two parties in government in Norway, together with the Conservative party.
We can conclude from the above that during the 1960s and 1970s, populism appeared to be a political phenomenon that hardly concerned Europe. In Italy, after the disappearance of the Uomo Qualunque, right extremism was analysed as regards its affiliation with historical fascism. Parties such as the Front National in France and the National Front in the UK, which appeared in the 1970s, were also labelled under the category of ‘fascists’ or far right and extreme right. They were not defined as populist. Moreover, the Finnish experience could be categorised in the area of ‘rural populism’, as a remnant of the past. It is only since the 1980s and especially from the 1990s onwards that populism has become a main category through which contemporary political European movements and parties are defined. Scholars such as Pierre-André Taguieff (2002, 2007) have re-adapted the concept of populism to contemporary European trends.
How can an experience, which historically developed in phases or countries in transition from mainly agrarian economies to industrial economies on the way towards modernisation, have meaning in post-modern and post-industrial Europe? Post-modernity means the end of great narratives; post-industrial means the end of the traditional class conflict. How is populism linked to these two categories: post-modernity and post-industrial?
Most literature on populism in Europe does not really answer this question. It takes pains to establish a link or symbiosis between past populisms, in order to connect them with the present, and limits itself to making a sort of list of the main features shared by the parties and movements that are labelled as populist in Europe. What is generally evoked is the dichotomous relationship between the people and the elites, which produces a Manichean opposition between allies and enemies (Mény and Surel 2002), with the aim to countermand partitocratic structures (Canovan 1999), relying on a highly personalised, charismatic type of leadership; the plebiscitary transformation of democracy, including changes of the rule of the law; and eventually, the ethno-nationalist transformation and the hostility against foreigners and migrants, anti-intellectualism and the retraditionalisation of society (Mudde 2004).
Most research on populism features scholarship focusing on the right wing (Kitschelt 2007), which have become the new populist right (Laycock 2005), the right-wing populism (Rydgren 2003), the radical right populism (Abts and Rummens 2007; Fella and Ruzza 2009) or the national populist parties (Taguieff 2002). However, if the type of populism that has received the most scholarly attention in Europe is the one positioned on the right of the political spectrum, some studies speak of ‘proletarian populism’, represented in France by the National Front and the Trotskyist movements, who share their opposition to globalisation (Taguieff 2002). More recently, the label of populism has been attributed to the left-oriented parties that criticise the European order, demonstrating Euroscepticism. This label of populism – with clearly negative connotations – is often a way to hide or to ignore the reasons why the current economic crisis, and the way the European Union has dealt it, has enormously reinforced anti-European feelings. Accusing the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras or the Spanish party Podemos of populism in this context appears an ideological way to avoid debating alternative political proposals. This use and abuse of the term populist is gaining more and more critics, among them scholars (Galli della Loggia 2013; Sartori 2007; Tarchi 2013), politicians (Spinelli 2014) and even mainstream journalists (Nava 2014, 2015).
In order to avoid the labelling of populism becoming embedded in value judgments, it can be useful to refer to the work of Ernesto Laclau (2005), especially the book On Populist Reason. Laclau attempts to answer the problem reported by most scholars of populism: it is just impossible to find common characters that can bring together the wide variety of phenomena ranging from Russian populism to the North American People’s Party, from Latin America to Europe, and so on. For Laclau, populism is a ‘social logic’ and the way in which the ‘political’ has been built in modernity. As Laclau (2005: 6) puts it: ‘populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political’. In other terms, the political moment coincides with the construction of ‘the people’. But what is ‘the people’? Laclau does not identify the people with the working class, opposing the capital, as was the case for the Marxists. The people is not a homogeneous class, but an ‘empty signifier’ that becomes a political subject through the social practices of discourse, language and rhetoric, which produces an identity, unifying the heterogeneity of irreducible social demands and constructs an imaginary in the struggle for hegemony between the different populisms. The social group that takes possession of ‘the people’ can translate its hegemony in society. There is populism at the ‘right’, which expresses corporate or nationalistic positions; and there is populism at the ‘left’, founded on an image capable of uniting the experience of exploitation with the aim of overthrowing the existing power relations. Populist movements are thus not only to be viewed in a negative way. Populism has a twofold logic: on the one hand it represents the moment of rupture with the existing order (therefore it has an anti-institutional dimension that challenges the normalisation policy), on the other hand it represents the creation of a new order.
If we consider populism as opposing the existing order, following Laclau, present populist trends can be understood only if we place them in the present context of neo-liberal hegemony and look at the conflicts among the different forces. Given that a society develops in the conflict, the order that neo-liberalism relies on is that of hierarchies determined by the market and considered as natural or scientific rules. Such an order is actually always unstable, never reducible to economic laws. Politics, for Laclau, is not a technique or administration, but hegemony and the strategy of force.
The experiences we have analysed or mentioned so far – that is, Russian narodnichestvo, the USA’s People’s Party, Latin American populist regimes, such as Vargism and Peronism, post-colonial governments, such as Nasserism, Uomo Qualunque, Poujadisme and various Scandinavian parties – have little in common, besides the fact of having been political actors in their respective countries.
According to Margaret Canovan, both narodnichestvo and the People’s Party should be grouped in ‘agrarian populism’, having in common the fact that the peasants (the ‘farmer’ in the USA) are seen as bearers of moral virtues and agriculture as being the foundation of society. This evidently opposes the Marxist vision that places the working class in the centre of the emancipation of society (Canovan 1981: 106). Other forms of populism are, instead, part of political populism (Canovan 1981: 136), which in turn divided political populism into several categories (democratic, dictatorial and reactionary). The type of populism represented by Giannini and Poujade would mainly connote ‘populist politicians’ or a political style that establishes a dichotomy between ‘the people’ and the corrupt elite, while suggesting a direct link between ‘the people’ themselves and the populist leader in order to build a cohesive and consistent strategy (Mudde 2004). However, these types are not mutually exclusive – for example, the Finnish Rural Party represents a turn away from agrarian populism towards political populism.
A striking feature, however, is the difficulty of including in the same category experiences that were limited to the role of opposition and ultimately marginal, as well as governmental experiences, such as the Latin American ones. The only way to escape these contradictions is to look at the structural conditions behind the different experiences in the processes of socio-economic transformations, as Germani (1973, 1978) did, or at the political conflicts for the hegemony around the construction of the people, following Laclau’s (2005) approach, or both. As Germani pointed out, the populist regimes of Latin American modernisation – obtained through an alliance of different classes – characterised Latin American and post-colonial societies. The situation in Europe – the continent at the core of modernisation – was completely different: the main conflict was class conflict, with the proletarian class at the centre of the change. The exasperation of the class conflict after World War I and the Russian revolution led to fascism and Nazism (see Chapter 3 in this book).
The present context has changed with the passage from the industrial to the post-industrial society, from modernity to post-modernity, from nation states to globalisation, while the hegemonic triumph of neo-liberalism dictates the economic and political rules. Contemporary populism has to be understood in respect of this background. According to the neo-liberal ideology of the free market, the decline of democracy and the era of post-democracy, with the economy seeming to dominate the political agenda, are crucial elements that have to be taken into account in respect to present European populism. Therefore, analysis of contemporary populism needs to consider the rise of economic pragmatism employed by the global corporate capital that weakens the role of the state and of politics.
1 This expression – ‘a strange thing happened to populism: populism has become popular’ – was used by Pierre André Taguieff (2007: 17), one of the first European scholars who worked on the topic. The expression is often quoted in the media (see Courtois 2007).
2 The article was written on 3 December 1921 under the pseudonym of Giuseppe Baretti, quoted by Bruno Buongiovanni (1996).
3 Following other Marxist thinkers and, as we have seen, Lenin himself, Antonio Gramsci was also very critical of the Russian populism, considered an attempt towards the recovery of ‘the people’ by a bourgeois thought interested in maintaining its hegemony over the popular classes, hiding the class dimension and the centrality of the proletarians.
4 "You are made to hate each other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded because you do not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars you both. The colored tenant is in the same boat as the white tenant, the colored laborer with the white laborer and that the accident of color can make no difference in the interests of farmers, croppers and laborers." See: www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_org_populist.html.
5 Today, in the USA, populist discourse against the East Coast elite (bankers, industrialists) has been hijacked by the Republicans, who, against all reason, try to convince farmers and blue-collar workers that they represent the interests of regular folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who supposedly only defend the rights of the same East Coast elite.
6 In other countries, the populist forces were not able to get into power – for example, the aprism of APRA (the Alianza Popular Revolutionary political party founded in Peru in 1924 by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre).
7 Among the attempts to modernise the country in an industrial direction, we can also mention the example of Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, founded in 1941 by Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, which promoted a process (1952–1956) that led to the nationalisation of mines and an attempt at agrarian reform. However, Victor Paz Estenssoro was in no way a populist leader (neither for the rhetoric, nor for the political profile). He is much closer to the revolutionary model of the Latin American leaders of the nineteenth century.
8 Boulanger, who promoted aggressive nationalism, won a series of elections and was feared to be powerful enough to establish himself as dictator at the apogee of his popularity in 1889. His base of support was in the working districts of Paris and other cities, including rural traditionalist Catholics and royalists.
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