The new composition of the European Parliament after the elections in 2014 is expected to be rather different. It is estimated that the number of anti-Europeans and Eurosceptics will increase from around 100 to around 200 MEPs in a total of 751 seats, reinforcing the presence of radical parties.
The recent Eurocrisis has shown a fact that is relatively obvious for observers of Latin American and US politics, namely, that populism can be both right-wing and left-wing in nature, but has two opposing terms which together define it: elitism and pluralism.
What happened when two teachers from one of the biggest and most populated cities in Poland, decided to put multicultural Wroclaw to the test; and how they encountered serious problems the minute they actually tried to implement their programme.
Isn’t it time to start dissecting the extremism of this ‘moderate centre’? Is it not the duty of every truly moderate citizen/social scientist, of every democrat, to radically oppose this extremism camouflaged as moderation?
What democracy really means is the capacity to do things. While the governing elite has increasingly borrowed populist rhetoric from the extreme right to win elections, it has also used the growth of populism to discredit the concept of ‘the people’ and redefine the meaning of democracy.
To position a new hegemony, heterogeneous social demands have to be yoked together, in order to define what ‘the people’ amounts to. This is why a debate about the rarely-explained term 'populism' is overdue.
Why do some political scientists seem oblivious to the fact that the ‘moderates’ who let down their electorates are mainly responsible for their own demise? A reply to Catherine Fieschi’s Who’s afraid of the populist wolf?
Populism may not be entirely coherent (what ideology is in its lived form?) but it has a consistent logic, and a line of distinction along which it treads that marks it out and accounts for its power. We should beware of falling into the many traps it creates for democrats.
One might note that the less represented the ‘popular’ classes are in political parties, in parliament or in government, the more ‘populism’ is branded a threat.
The far right in Greece has become completely independent from the right, and is turning into a loose canon against New Democracy rather than SYRIZA or the other parties of the centre-left.
It is time that we realised where the real danger in Europe lies, and that there is a candidate to help us fight back against this gathering danger. But to do this we must begin to recognise how both are misrepresented for our consumption. A reply to Etienne Balibar.
Populist movements can bear a strong, but misleading, resemblance to more respectable cousins: movements for democratic accountability. It has now become fashionable even to argue that ‘some populism is good’ - because populism is seen as ‘speaking truth to power’. It’s important therefore for dem
