June 2023 was a disastrous month for several populist leaders. In the UK, Boris Johnson resigned from his MP seat and political career, anticipating a lengthy suspension handed down days later by a parliamentary committee that found him guilty of lying to the House of Commons about the parties he allowed and at which participated in Downing Street, violating his own strict rules of social distancing during the pandemic. In Brazil, the Electoral Court imposed the disqualification until 2030 of Jair Bolsonaro for abuse of power by vilifying, without evidence, the efficient electronic voting system in his country in front of foreign ambassadors in Brasilia. With him currently facing fifteen other charges related mostly to attempting to steal the election, his political career could be over as well. In the United States, a special prosecutor has indicted Donald Trump in federal court for possession and misuse of top-secret documents. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi – whose brazen display of masculine impulsiveness and his alleged successes as a businessman inspired Trump – died, but not before seeing Giorgia Meloni, one of his admirers, in power. Finally, Cristina Kirchner, who has dominated Argentine politics for the last twenty years, failed in her attempt to propose one of her political heirs as a Peronist candidate for the October presidential election. To avoid a primary vote that would have shown the loss of popular support for her, she had to resign herself to the nomination of the current Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, a rival who represents a very different current of Peronism, more pragmatic and liberal.
Populism, properly defined, is not an ideology. As Jan-Werner Müller has written, it is a political methodology. It can be left or right. Its essence consists of having a leader who presents himself as the “savior of the people” -which is not all citizens but the “authentic” or “real” people defined by himself- against his enemies: to cite just a few examples. , these can be the oligarchy (for Cristina Kirchner or Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in Mexico), the “empire” (Hugo Chávez), the “swamp” of Washington and the “Deep State” for the trumpists, “Brussels that steals from us ” (Johnson) or “Madrid that robs us” (for the Catalan independence movement, which had strong populist features) or communism, real or imagined, for Bolsonaro and others.
The populist leader believes in democracy but tries to subdue it in his attempt to remain in power. He defines political competition as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil where defeat is unthinkable, so he tries to control the electoral authority. Because only the leader represents the “real” people, populism mistrusts civil society, the free media, and any independent body that limits the unbridled exercise of executive power, especially an autonomous judiciary.
Fortunately, in some of the cases mentioned, the counterweights and independent institutions have resisted. In Britain, the Supreme Court blocked an attempt by Johnson to shut down Parliament during a period of Brexit negotiations. And thanks to a free press, his attempts to cover up partygate failed. Trump managed to impose a conservative majority on the Supreme Court but not on the entire justice system. Bolsonaro controls neither the Electoral Tribunal nor the Federal Supreme Court and, although he retains the sympathy of many in the military, the generals did not go along with their supporters’ attempt to take over Brasilia and oust Lula from the presidency in January of this year. In Argentina, Cristina Kirchner twice unsuccessfully tried to pass legal changes to tame the judiciary.
In countries that maintain sufficient liberties, populism can fail from the bankruptcy to which its policies lead. In the United Kingdom, Brexit has not been the economic catastrophe that some predicted, but it has had a very negative impact. Liz Truss’s lunatic attempts to induce growth by abandoning fiscal discipline served to demonstrate the broader failure of the project, already recognized by a clear majority of Britons. Kirchnerism, with its need to offer subsidies to its political clientele, offers no solution to the deepening crisis in the Argentine economy, which this practice has caused to a large extent.
But populism can be reborn. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa’s substitute candidate has a real chance of winning the presidential election in August. The Argentines could opt for an even more extreme and right-wing populist, Javier Milei, a friend of Vox in Spain. In France, unspoken fears over violence in protests against pension reform and the murder of a young man of North African origin by police could finally lead Marine Le Pen to the presidency. Trump, despite everything, could win again. Artificial intelligence offers powerful new tools for the populist manipulation of public opinion.
Urban populism was a Latin American invention. In recent times it has spread throughout the democratic world because it offers a solace, albeit fallacious, to people who feel threatened by changes in their environment – austerity, the dizzying speed of technological development, globalization, mass immigration, etc. – and resentful of the inequalities that allow others to benefit from them. These conditions continue. But recent events show that populism can be defeated as long as independent institutions are maintained. That is why in Mexico the resistance to the castration of the National Electoral Institute (ine) and the judiciary is so important. Losing that battle carries the risk that when citizens want to free themselves from populism due to their failures, they realize that they can no longer. ~
2023-08-01 17:33:43
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