In this article, Panos Panayotu* introduces the concept of transnational left-wing populism and explains why it is a necessary answer to Donald Trump’s victory. Following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, he provides a brief overview about the advantages of a populist movement which goes beyond national boundaries and that provides an alternative approach to globalization.
Donald Trump
This blog wants to show also the paradoxical, extreme, funny, and soft aspects of complex political phenomena.
This is why, if one is prepared to cast an amused look to the Greek crisis, this link is phenomenal:
http://www.random-austerity-measure-generator.com/#
You can generate your random austerity measures from the comfort of your hammock.
Another aspect of this grotesque situation, is the controversial reply of Angela Merkel to a fourteen-year-old refugee. Merkel, accused of having humiliated Tsipras, had then to face the critiques for her reply to the young girl. I found the critiques to Merkel out of focus. She has not been mean. She has not been hypocritical. She just defended her policies on migration. She told the young Palestinian that Germany cannot host all the migrants. She did not make an exception for electoral purposes, even if that would have been easy. She didn’t say: we don’t want migrants, but since you’re here, in front of me, and you’re cute, and you’re crying, I will make an exception and let you come with your family. One can argue that the German policy about migrants is wrong, but not that Merkel has been mean. Here a good analysis of the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/merkel-and-the-crying-girl-five-lessons
In case you didn’t see it yet, you can judge by yourself:
POP goes on holidays for a while. The last suggestion for now is to read this interesting article from The Telegraph. The title is self-explanatory: Republican race has the flavour of ‘populism on crack’.
Have a good summer folks.
“When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.”
David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason
Samuele Mazzolini
This is the first of many interviews that POP will propose in the next months. Scholars, journalists, politicians and experts will answer timing questions about the nature and development of populism. For this first interview, we have Samuele Mazzolini. He is a PhD candidate in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. His research focuses on the declining hegemony of the Italian Left, read through the lenses of post-Marxist discourse theory. He is also interested in Latin American and European left-wing populism. He previously worked for the Ecuadorian government and is now a regular columnist of the state-owned daily newspaper El Telégrafo. He is also a blogger for the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Today, New Zealand counts seven sheep for every person, but the proportion was 20/1 in 1983. Why mentioning such a trivial statistic? Because the populist guys – those who share the concerns of the man of the street – will explain the phenomenon telling us that some conspiracy lurks in the background, maybe some international corporation is stealing sheep in order to manipulate the oil price through the wool price, and the people must know where the sheep have gone. They have the right to know. OK, maybe I am not fair: some of these populist guys are probably smarter than this, or less practical, but this point will become clearer later on.
POP 