Populism and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy

Michel Caillouët
Former EU ambassador in Thailand and India

Marc Lazar & Ilvo Diamanti
Peuplecratie: La metamorphose de nos démocraties  (in French)
[“Peoplecracy”, the metamorphosis of our democracies]
Ed. Gallimard, 2019

Marc Lazar is professor of history and political sociology at Sciences Po in Paris, and a specialist of the movements of the left in Europe, of the politics in France and Italy after WWII, and of contemporary populism. He had published in 2019 La «peuplecratie», la metamorphose de nos démocraties, a topical book to this day, in which he analyses the rise of populist movements in Europe. In his opinion, their force is to present themselves as the best defenders of democracy …!

Peuplecratie, the book's title, is actually a neologism which has the same meaning of the Greek etymology of democracy (“power of the people”), but with a less noble twist; Marc Lazar acknowledges that it sounds better in Italian: popolocrazia; Ilvo Diamanti, with whom he wrote the book, is a talented writer, and an inventor of words. The emergence of new political practices, or new regimes, requires to devise new expressions. So did, in the 1930s and 1950s, that of “totalitarianism”, which tried to convey what could have in common Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism.

However, whether in power or in opposition, today's populist movements are changing the very foundations of liberal and representative democracy.

Democracy, in its modern practice, is based on the separation of powers and on everything that comes under the rule of law born of the Enlightenment. We are now entering, under the pressure of these movements, a completely different period… These populist movements and their leaders insist that people sovereignty is limitless. All kinds of state powers must give way to universal suffrage.

The second element that characterizes them is the emphasis not only on direct democracy but also on immediate democracy, without any form of mediation, bypassing intermediary bodies and parties. Their discourse is one of permanent urgency. They claim that there are simple solutions for all problems, hence their demand for a systematic practice of referendums. They have also well understood the revolution represented by social networks, which they use to the full.

“Peoplecracy” has not yet won, but it is there as a great challenge to liberal and representative democracy. The populists have already succeeded in imposing their way of doing politics and their use of time, so much so that those who want to fight them can only be tempted to resort in turn to what we call the populist style.

It is undoubtedly a situation that evokes that of the 1930s, even if there are fundamental differences with that period. Thus, in France, the populists of the time, like the Leagues, called for an authoritarian or even dictatorial regime, because democracy was ineffective. Instead, the strength of contemporary populists is to reverse that logic and present themselves as the best defenders of democracy, claiming that they, unlike the "caste" or the "establishment", are not afraid of the people. And they challenge the traditional parties: why don't you introduce referendums? Why don't you organize consultations on the Internet? Thus, these movements are both a continuation of the old populist movements and a breakup: like them, they play on the "all rotten" idea and on the opposition between the "real country" and the "legal country", according to the expression of Charles Maurras. But, at the same time, they surf on the criticism of politics, pretending to better taking into account popular participation, and on the aspiration to another politics.

Their strength is to be at the junction of these two themes in the face of the traditional parties, unable to respond to this double challenge… “Peoplecracy”, if it comes to power and if it consolidates, is indeed a step towards something else: the illiberal democracy or the “democrature” already at work in Warsaw and Budapest.

How can populism be defined? The abundant production in political science on the subject revolves around two poles. On the one hand, there are those who believe that it is a new form of political ideology, fragile, loosely structured but replacing the great ideologies of the 19th century, which are now in decline. On the other hand, those who see populism primarily as a political style.

There is a populist phenomenon, but populisms are many: they are not all of extreme-right or right. There are left populist movements like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, LFI in France. There are regional populist movements (Vlams Belang in Belgium), and of course, on the far right, Rassemblement National and Reconquête in France, the coalition around Meloni in Italy... A new form of the current populism is constituted by the figure of a businessman embarking on politics, whose archetype was Silvio Berlusconi, and who triumphed across the Atlantic with Donald Trump or in the Czech Republic with Andrej Babis.

They claim that a country is to be run like a business, and constantly refer to popular common sense and the supposed values of the people. Their very acceptance of the people varies. For some, the people is populus – the citizen, conscious people; for others is plebs - the pleb, that is to say the mass. There is also the ethnos, that is to say people on an ethnic basis… Or even the people as consumers, whom Silvio Berlusconi was willingly addressing himself to. Populist movements combine these various meanings.

So, how to explain this rise of populist movements? We have built the European Union, but not the European People, let's face it!

We must take into account the serious social distress: unemployment, precariousness, inequalities and poverty. However, there is no direct link between the economic crisis and the populist vote: Austria, breeding ground for populism with its FPÖ party, is one of the richest countries in the EU, with very low unemployment...

Another factor is the perception of Islam as a threat, after various terrorist attacks. The flow of migrants explains the identitarian withdrawal of many, especially since the two major models of integration – the multicultural model and the French “republican” model – are in crisis.

But there is above all the mistrust vis-à-vis politics and the institutions, and this makes the situation explosive.