Interview #62 – 20 Years of Populist Zeitgeist with Cas Mudde

April 2, 2024April 2, 2024Leave a comment

One of the most iconic pieces of academic literature on populism celebrates its 20th anniversary since publication. We’re referring to “The Populist Zeitgeist”, Cas Mudde’s paper published by Government & Opposition in 2004. Since then, it has been cited thousands of times and has established itself as a guiding light for scholars in need of a definition of populism.

Without “The Populist Zeitgeist” this blog would probably not exist. But what arguments are developed beyond the definition of populism in the paper? What does the author think of it two decades after its publication? How has “The Populist Zeitgeist” aged so far? How has the field of populism studies evolved since 2004? POP asked all these questions, and more to Cas Mudde himself. Along the way, you’ll see mentions of Ernesto Laclau, Margaret Canovan, Peter Mair, Donald Trump, Robert Plant, and many others.

Enjoy the read…

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A semiotic analysis of political billboards in Lisbon: 2024 elections edition.

February 29, 2024Leave a comment

A year ago, in March 2023, I published the first half of this experiment. I took pictures of political billboards in Lisbon, Portugal, and analyzed them. That first part, which you can read here, was about the billboards of all major (and some minor) Portuguese right-wing parties. Since then, I continued my strolls and even intensified my flâneur activities, taking pictures of left-wing parties’ political advertisements across the city. Like last year, most pictures are taken while I bike to my office, crossing some of the most traffic-intense avenues of Portugal’s capital.

The national elections are already here, and soon afterward it will be time for the elections of the European Parliament, with the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in between. The Portuguese Left is in the middle of an internal reconfiguration, with the incumbent Socialist Party affected by a huge corruption scandal that caused Prime Minister António Costa to resign. What will happen to the Portuguese Left? Is the last orthodox Communist party in Western Europe going to survive? Will the socialists be able to surprise their detractors, rising once again from their ashes?

To stay updated about the day-by-day semiotic analysis of political billboards, follow the Telegram channel of POP (here) and the BlueSky account (here).

Meanwhile, enjoy the read.

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Populism in Central and South-Eastern Europe

January 31, 2024January 23, 2024Leave a comment

Natasza Styczyńska presents a book about populism outside of Western Europe. This, per se, is already a very interesting premise because way too often we tend to conflate ‘European populism’ with just a few Western European countries, while this new volume describes the characteristics of populism in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Moreover, the volume offers a very interesting overview of the features that unite different populist manifestations across Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro as well as the differences between several types of populisms in these countries. Natasza Styczyńska discusses the interactions between populism and phenomena such as Euroscepticism, religion, corruption, clientelism and oligarchic structures across Central and South-Eastern European countries, with an eye to the post-communist transition and the formation of ‘democratic illiberalism’.

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Interview #61 – Mainstreaming Authoritarianism

January 16, 2024January 12, 2024Leave a comment

In this interview we talk with Giorgos Katsambekis about the process of mainstreaming of authoritarianism. The topics approached in this conversation are extremely relevant given the current Zeitgeist. In these days Donald Trump is trying a comeback after the 2021 failed coup, in Italy 1000 fascists gathered in Rome to commemorate their dead camerati, with a great display of fascist salutes and Celtic crosses, while the French ‘moderate Right’ approved a controversial anti-immigration bill that the radical Right considers a victory.

Katsambekis offers a lucid account of the processes that make it possible for authoritarian ideas, values, and discourses to move from the margins of the public debate to its very centre, combining a profound theoretical reflection with concrete examples from France, Greece, the United States, and the European Parliament.

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Interview #60 — The Far Right and the Politics of Memory

November 29, 2023Leave a comment

The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in power since one year, and she has been very busy opening an exhibition in Rome about J.R.R. Tolkien (one of her old obsessions, we talked about it in one of the last interviews, here). But this is far from the only thing she has been busy with during the last 12 months. She also devoted quite some time to official visits to former Italian colonies such as Libya, Albania, and Ethiopia, discussing issues linked to energy, migrants, and infrastructures.

Last May, I went to King’s College (London) for the presentation of Marianna Griffini’s book ‘The Politics of Memory in the Italian Populist Radical Right’. It was a very interesting event, with great discussions about the contemporary far right and its selective memory of the colonial past. I revised my notes for the event’s introduction and pulished them as an article for Jacobin (here, in Italian).

Since then, the relevance of the Italian colonial past has done nothing but increasing, and it could have been hardly different with the far-right government currently in power. In this interview, we discuss with Marianna Griffini the removal of the country’s past, the role of the far right in this process, as well as current and future developments.

Enjoy the read.

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Interview #59 – Nostalgia and the radical right

September 19, 2023September 15, 2023Leave a comment

POP already treated extensively about the links between populism, the far right, and nostalgia. In the last year alone, we had a great talk with Francesca Melhuish, who analyzed British nostalgia and Brexit, as well as Ezgi Elçi, who studied Ottoman nostlagia in Turkey.

In this interview, Luca Versteegen shows that nostalgia predicts support for radical right parties and is associated with more negative evaluations of the government.

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Brothers and Sisters of Italy: From Fascist Roots to Normalization — A Double Interview

July 11, 2023September 26, 20231 Comment

In this double interview we finally talk about Italy with two Professors, Filippo Tronconi and Gianfranco Baldini, who are investigating Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. This is an important interview that makes up, at least in part, for POP’s lack of attention to Italy. Being an Italian myself, I have always preferred not to deal with Italy because Italian politics (as interesting as it is) is also neurotic, unbearable, and at times incommentable.

The time to open this wound and look into it has finally come.

Tronconi and Baldini explain the electoral success of Brothers of Italy, a relatively new party that replaced Salvini’s Lega as the biggest party in the conservative camp. They help us understanding many important aspects of Brothers of Italy. First, what kind of party is it? Populist radical right? Nationalist and conservative? Neofascist? Second, how is it possible that the first female Prime Minister in Italy is not at all interested in any feminist agenda but rather proposes a traditional family model? And how did the party change once it won the elections and took power? Is Giorgia Meloni going to try and Orbanize Italy? How could she go from admiring Putin for years to endorse the sending of weapons to Ukraine?

The answers to these and many other questions in this long, dense interview.

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Interview #58 — The Will of the People

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023Leave a comment

In conversation with Yanina Welp, we discuss some of the topics present in her last book: The will of the people. Populism and citizens participation in Latin America. Latin America is a region where populism is prolific and often appears with characteristics that are different compared to European populism.

POP already devoted several interviews and articles about populism in Latin America and in comparison with Europe, with a focus on the Andes region and Brazil among other things, and if you are interested in Latin American populism you can find much more content in The Populism Interviews, including an amazing interview to Federico Finchelstein.

In today’s interview we discuss the inclusion of the people’s will in populist political projects across Latin America, instances of controlled mobilisation, the importance of trust in institutions and among people, dissatisfaction with democracy, democratic political culture, the role of political parties, and much more.

Enjoy the read.

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Bolsonaro: Beyond the Concept of Populism

May 31, 2023Leave a comment

The label of ‘populist’ is not useful to understand why Bolsonaro, a far-right politician, is a danger for Brazilian democracy. In this article, João Feres Júnior explains why this is the case.

Feres Júnior has been working on Bolsonaro for years, and you can find some of his most recent work here and here. In a previous article for POP, Eduardo Tamaki convincingly claimed that Bolsonaro is indeed a populist: though in apparent contradiction, the points of contact between the two approaches are numerous and that’s why it is interesting to read both articles in parallel to form a complete opinion.

One of the most interesting parts of Feres Júnior’s arguments is that beyond his populist traits and discourse, to really understand Bolsonaro’s ideology we must analyse his daily communicative guerrilla against the traditional press. The Bolsonarista communicational sphere is formed by traditional media, digital media, and the communication networks of evangelical churches and reactionary Catholicism.

Enjoy the read…

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Chinese Populisms and Social Control

March 29, 2023March 29, 2023Leave a comment

In this article Kun He talks about Chinese-style populism. This is an interesting and important article not only because it focuses on a rather neglected case when it comes ot populism (populism in non-democratic settings is a unicorn in this field), but also because it makes it possible expand our understanding of populism to include a non-Western perspective. What happens to populism when we stop thinking about it in the context of democratic countries? Well, in the Chinese case, first we have to distinguish between communist populism and online bottom-up populism. Then, we must consider that both types of populism, combined, act as a pressure valve for the social volcano that is China.

The Blank Paper Protests are over, but online populism remains alive.

Enjoy the read.

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