Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with workers in downtown Montreal, Canada in February 2016. Kadri Mohamed/Press Association. All rights reserved.openDemocracy is a media partner of the World Forum for Democracy 2017: the subject this year is 'populism'. In the run-up to that event in early November, we asked what kind of politics and media we need "to re-connect to citizens, make informed choices and function optimally in 21st century democracy." Fernando Casal Bértoa was one of three rapporteurs summing up the debate in the event's closing session. He focused on the health of representative democracy.
Good morning everyone. I would like to start my intervention with a personal experience that I hope echoes your feelings about this Forum. I came here with pessimism, worrying about the victory of the populists in the Czech Republic, considered to be one of the most stable democracies in post-Communist Europe; and the rise of populist forces in Germany which we thought was vaccinated against these kinds of political movements. But after two and a half days of constructive debate, interesting ideas and meeting active, motivated people old and young, I have ended up in a more optimistic frame of mind. If you will allow me to say so, paraphrasing Karl Marx, we are more prepared than I had thought to combat this spectre haunting Europe which is called populism.
Having said that, these two days and a half convinced me that we do need not only to worry about populism, but also to enquire into the causes of populism and what has caused this rise in populism. It was clear in all the labs and all the sessions I attended that this is about a distance opening up between the citizens and their political systems: people are voting less, people participate less, and identify less with political parties. And it is this clear political gap that has been exploited by the populists. Trust in institutions is very low. Any survey that you look at, you will see that the government, parliaments and political parties are always at the low end of the graph. Of course this creates a danger for representative democracy, which is what I want to concentrate on in my report-back.
