The Tidal Wave of Populism(s): A View From and On Europe

The article identifies and discusses the range of populisms that exist in what seems to be a “a wave of the age” that has manifested itself in the US, the UK and Italy in relation to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi.
Other European developments are also examined including the populisms around Prime Minister of Giorgio Meloni of Italy; the continuing rule in Hungary of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party; the continued pertinence of the Rassemblement Nationale in France; and the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Identified characteristics of ‘populism(s)’ can, in principle, be associated with either the Left or Right wings of politics, but are usually closely connected with are times of social crisis within which widespread economic problems lead to profound social distress. In recent years in Europe the populisms of the political Left have tended to be articulated not in terms of a divide between the working class and the rest, but more in terms of the material interests of a very small number of hyper-rich individuals and a limited number of multinational corporations as conflicting with the vast majority of people across the working and middle classes. But the political Right has had a tendency, through identifying so-called ‘wedge issues’, both to insinuate conspiracy theories and demagogically to stoke ‘culture wars’ through which anger is then directed at a much broader range ‘enemies' which is done through a process of ‘othering’ in which cultural/ethnic and/or religious, and/or political ‘differences’ are instrumentalised against ‘insiders’, while also being stoked against ‘outsiders’ from the Two Thirds World who, regardless of their status in law as asylum-seekers or potential migrants, are framed as an undifferentiated mass of ‘illegals’. In Europe the development such populism(s) is largely achieved through the pursuit of an electoral politics that is informed by highly sophisticated and manipulative social media mechanisms which are able to segment the general population into groups that are statistically predicted to be receptive to particular ‘messages.’ In the face of this, one of the biggest challenges arising is for politicians to be able to articulate political visions of a kind that challenge the ‘business as usual’ approach of a mere technocratic management of what is experienced by so many as a fundamentally unjust economic system without running the risk of falling into alternative populist utopianisms of a kind that, on their first sustained engagement with the ambiguous realities of social, political and economic life will lead to further disenchantment and cynicism around the political process that could then metamorphosise into even more dangerous developments.