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MADRID.- In recent years, prominent figures – from historian Timothy Snyder to Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State – have identified national populism and fascism. I disagree.
National populism is a political movement that spread across the West in the wake of the 2008 crisis, just as fascism did in the wake of the 1929 crisis. Both have manifested themselves differently in each country: just as Italian fascism, German Nazism or Spanish Falangism were not the same, Trump, Brexit or Puigdemont (or Le Pen, Orban or Salvini) are not the same. The undisputed leader of fascism was Hitler; the visible leader of national populism, Putin (and the not so visible Xi Jinping): he supported Trump’s coming to power, Brexit and the Catalan autumn of 2017, he financed Le Pen and Salvini, and he is hand in glove with Orban.
History never repeats itself exactly, but, as human beings never stop making the same mistakes, it always repeats itself with different masks; Thus, national populism is a postmodern mask of fascism. The similarities between the two are obvious: hostility to democracy, nationalism, the massive use of lies; no less obvious are their differences. The most notable: fascism systematically used violence as a political instrument; not so national populism (or not in Europe, until the war in Ukraine).
But the fundamental difference is another. Fascism arose at a time when democracy was in great disrepute, and that is why it openly sought to crush it; the moment of national populism is different. In a macro study carried out by World Values Survey91.6% of people questioned around the world said that democracy was a good way to govern their country, meaning that, as David van Reybrouck has written, “the share of the world’s population in favour of the concept of democracy has never been higher than it is today.”
In light of the above, national populism has developed a form of aggression against democracy that is the opposite of that of fascism: it is about attacking democracy in the name of democracy. This can be done by undermining institutions, but also in less subtle ways. Those who stormed the Capitol in Washington in 2021 had nothing to do with those who stormed the Congress of Madrid in 1981 (the latter wanted to clearly put an end to democracy, while the former shouted for the return of the democracy that, according to Trump, was being stolen from them), and the Catalan secessionists who in September 2017 pulverized the Statute and tore up the Constitution claimed to practice radical democracy. That is the most notable difference between fascism and national populism.: the first explicitly disbelieves in democracy and attacks it frontally and from outside; the second pretends to believe in democracy in order to attack it from within, destroying the rule of law, which is the basis of democracy.
Fascism and national populism are very similar in substance, but in form they are opposites, and in politics, as in almost everything, form is inseparable from substance. Simply identifying fascism and national populism will not help defeat the latter: it prevents it from being defeated, just as a bad diagnosis prevents a disease from being cured.
Sixteen years after the outbreak of fascism, the Second World War essentially defeated it; 16 years after its outbreak, National populism is still here. Of course, it is better to continue dealing with it than to bear 50 million dead, but we should find its antidote as soon as possible: until we find it, national populism is worse than fascism. Or perhaps we have already found its antidote and have not known how to apply it. The antidote cannot consist of fomenting the disease (as we have done in Catalonia, where, thanks to the amnesty, the secessionists remain convinced that in 2017 they defended democracy); it consists of showing that their solutions are a sham and improving people’s lives in the only known way: by strengthening democracy, which is the other name for the rule of law. It is in our hands.ß
THE COUNTRY SLU
Conocé The Trust Project
