It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

Instead of wringing our hands about the rise of populism, can we finally do something about it?

 
Από: Dalibor Rohac,

Because they are tailored to appeal to voters, all political platforms are, to some extent, “populist.” But what sets the wave of populism currently sweeping across the Western world apart from politics as usual is its impatience with constraints placed on democratic governments — in other words, its authoritarianism. When Fox News host Brett Baier suggested that the military would refuse Donald Trump’s orders to torture captured jihadis, the latter responded simply, “They’re not going to refuse me.” The notion that leaders elected by popular majorities can flout legal norms, constitutional rules, and democratic checks and balances is at heart of the “illiberal democracy” promoted by Viktor Orban in Hungary and the ethos of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, which has held power since October.

Although most frequently associated with political right, authoritarian populism cuts across ideological lines. True to their Maoist and Leninist precepts, the more radical members of Greece’s Syriza oppose not just Greece’s European creditors but also “capitalism itself.” In January, Spain’s newly elected Chamber of Deputies held its swearing-in ceremony. In a departure from tradition, many of the new deputies from the left-wing Podemos party conspicuously promised not just to “abide by the constitution,” but also to “work toward changing it.” Support for authoritarian populists is driven by different factors in different countries. Much like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each unhappy in their own way, today’s populists, both on the left and right, are responding to grievances specific to each particular time and place.

Full content is available here at Foreign Policy.

 
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Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies European political and economic trends. Specifically, he is working on Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union (EU) and the eurozone, US-EU relations, and the post-Communist transitions and backsliding of countries in the former Soviet bloc. He is concurrently a visiting junior fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.