"Realising the Athenian ideal of fully engaged, responsible, critically-thinking citizens who debate, discuss and deliberate before they vote on their laws must be our ultimate aim." Pericles' oration. Wikimedia. CC.Is populism a problem? In a word: Yes.
But we didn’t pack our bags there and then. For two and a half days, speakers and attendees examined the state of our democratic political systems the same way one might examine a particularly old blue cheese discovered at the back of the fridge. Is it meant to smell like that? Was it always this mouldy? Would it be safer to just bin it? ‘Populism’ contested with words like ‘demagogue’, ‘nationalism’, ‘the people’, and, of course ‘democracy’. Everybody agreed that everything was wrong, so clearly defining problems proved problematic.
Attendees at the Council of Europe event were, of course, mostly European. Europe is currently experiencing a particular confluence of four significant crises which at the Forum often became conflated with populism. The Syrian refugee crisis and the decline of fact-based journalism present the first two, both inflamed by Russia as it seeks to destabilise Western political systems. The rise of nationalism presents a third crisis. The Second World War is passing out of our collective memory and globalism has lost its global appeal.
