Back in July 2018, when the idea that led to the birth of the #rethinkingPopulism project was being fleshed out, we argued that, at a time when the ways we think about and practice politics were undergoing a profound transformation, and with populism, as a concept and political strategy, having acquired centre stage in these reconfigurations, we needed a rigorous and constructive debate on how we can develop an understanding of populism that retains a critical edge in intellectual and political terms.
Thin definitions of populism as an ideology proposed by Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, as a largely discursive and stylistic repertoire as Rogers Brubaker suggests, or as a political strategy as Kurt Weyland proposes, share an understanding of populism as characterized by “people-centrism” and a binary, antagonistic representation of society and politics, taking the concrete form of “anti-elitism.” Despite their differences, these approaches have contributed to the understanding of populism as a political Zeitgeist increasingly characteristic of the current conjuncture.
But, if what is pertinent in understanding populism is its strategic dimension, in a political arena permeated by populist discourses and strategy repertoires, many argued, the success story of populist mobilizations needed not be exclusively the property of authoritarian or conservative leaderships but could and should be emulated by the left as long as the popular is defined in progressive, democratic terms. This is a central element in another important current in the study of populism epitomized in the work of Chantal Mouffe whose seminal book, For a Left Populism had just been released at the time. Drawing on Laclau’s earlier work on populism as well as their work on radical democracy, Mouffe argued in favour of a qualitatively different populism that would be best placed to counter and challenge reactionary, xenophobic versions of populism as well as inherently undemocratic, neoliberal technocratic political modes of governance.
