Bolsonaro: Beyond the Concept of Populism

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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.

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Chinese Populisms and Social Control

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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.

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Seven Billboards Outside Lisbon, Portugal

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When I go to the office, I usually take the bike lane along Avenida da República, one of the principal arteries of Lisbon. All political parties rely on the traffic to force the countless drivers to stare at their billboards as they wait for the green light. Whenever I pass, I get a free class on Portuguese politics.

When I arrived in Lisbon in 2019, I started working on a project that tried to answer the following question: why is there no populism in Portugal? By now it is clear that populism is a common feature of Portuguese politics, the question would be perceived as naive at best. Another aspect changed since 2019: the party system has been evolving rapidly, with the populist radical right entering the parliament for the first time since the Carnation Revolution that in 1974 started the third wave of democratization across the world.

The Portuguese party system was famous for its stability, and on the right the two main parties were PSD and CDS. Now CDS is out of the parliament, and PSD is challenged by many new parties. Opportunity structures on the right are so favourable that many are trying to carve out their own space: it is the Wild West out there.

For this reason, I started taking pictures of all the billboards of right-wing parties I see when going to the office: to map the political space, understand its future evolution, and have a better grasp at the strategies of all the actors involved.

This work was first published on Twitter, and now it is polished and expanded in this new format to have all the information in one place (and to have it somewhere that is not Twitter, a space by now unusable for ethical and technological reasons, but that’s another story).

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The Rise of the Capital-State and Neo-Nationalism: A New Polanyian Moment

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In this article, Oleksandr Svitych presents his new book, The Rise of the Capital-state and Neo-nationalism, third installment of the Global Populism series by Brill. By looking at cases such as Jobbik and Fidesz, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and progressive parties in South Korea, Svitych follows Polanyi and observes the effects of social marketization while answering the following questions: What is neo-nationalism, how can we contrast it, and what does it have to do with populism?

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Chatbot politicians: artificial intelligence and “next level” populism

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Is it already time to discuss the possible manifestations of artificial intelligence populism? What would populism look like in the form of AI? Let’s discover it together with Silvija Vuković, who engaged in a conversation with Leader Lars, the chatbot who represents the instances of a new experiment: the Synthetic Party.

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The stigmatization effect of radical right parties

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Are populist radical right parties stigmatized? And if so, is this stigmatization consistent over time? Testing these questions in a country where the populist radical right has been traditionally stigmatized, this article illustrates that the Sweden Democrats face indeed a strong stigma among the Swedish electorate. This stigmatization persists even now that an official cordon sanitaire no longer exists, or it is at least questioned. Through experiments realized in 2011 and 2018 the authors describe the degree of stigmatization of the populist radical right in Sweden and its evolution over time.

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Interview #57 — The strategic use of Populism

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What is a populist party? How do we recognize populist politicians? And even more importantly: if every political discourse can contain populism, does it still make sense to distinguish between populist and non-populist actors? In this interview, Magdalena Breyer explains that political actors – both populist as well as mainstream ones – can make use of a populist rhetoric in a strategic way. For example, both mainstream and populist parties are substantially more populist when in opposition. On the other hand, mainstream parties who lose votes don’t really become more populist. Moreover, Magdalena shows that in Austria the populist parties FPÖ and BZÖ substantially decreased their degree of populism when in government.

On a different note, the tour of presentations of The Populist Interviews continues. After three amazing events in the Netherlands, soon there will be an online even, a podcast, an Italian mini-tour, a presentation in Switzerland, and much more.

Check all the news and updates here, and enjoy the read!

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Interview #56 — Populism and Collective Nostalgia in Turkey

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In this interview, Ezgi Elçi talks about the populist use of the past. Collective nostalgia is about yearning for a time before a fall or a decline in society: populists often instrumentalize this feeling to generate an opposition between the pure people versus immoral elites. Unexpectedly, though, the nostalgia of populists is more about the future than the past. The elites allegedly betrayed the country in the past, but what really matters is to build a new society which, clearly, needs new (populist) elites.

We then move to discuss the case of Turkey, and how Erdogan’s party (AKP) exploits Ottoman nostalgia to legitimize contemporary policies: the secular elites are blamed because they cut ties between the people and the glorious Ottoman Empire, thus mobilizing mostly Islamic masses. We then talk about nostalgia in the UK, Hungary, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and the the links between nostalgia and populism.

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Interview #55 — The Empire Strikes Back: Brexit and Nostalgia

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In this interview, Francesca Melhuish claims that nostalgia played a crucial role on both sides of the Brexit referendum.

To better understand British Euroscepticism, and the different factors that made the Leave campaign succeed, Melhuish looks at colonial as well as imperial nostalgia, but also at the role of ‘anti-nostalgic’ nostalgia. Moreover, we discuss the role of Dominic Cummings, the idealization of the past in times of crisis, Captain Tom, Winston Churchill, ethno-nationalism, and much more.

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Populism, illiberalism and the anti-gender fight

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In this article, Anna Gwiazda explains how Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, is using LBTQ+ people in general, and transgender people in particular, to create divisions from which to gain politically. She explains how Kaczyński is following the steps of another populist radical right leader such as Orbán, who demonized sexual and gender minorities in Hungary to mobilize his voters and divide the opposition.

Under the conservative flag of ‘nation, family, tradition’, and using a populist discourse to portray the LGBTQ+ community as an internal enemy, it is possible to propose and implement abortion bans, fight feminism or the so-called ‘gender ideology’ (just another name for anything that does not fit the conservative, traditional, and Catholic idea of family and gender roles).

Showing what rising illiberalism and democratic backsliding can do to women and LGBTQ+ people, Anna Gwiazda presents her work on these topics and confronts us with a dramatic situation but also suggests that this is not necessarily good news for PiS on the long run. Will the Polish citizens follow the party or prefer different, less conservative options at the 2023 elections? Will PiS find itself isolated on its own side of the cultural divide that it decided to erect?

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