The current tide of populism

        Populism is a slippery word to pin down.  It's intended as a term of abuse for a politician you don't agree with, but what does it really mean?  After all, if populism simply means proposing policies that the majority of people, particularly on the lower socio-economic rungs of society, approve of, then every successful politician must be a populist.  I think that the intended modern meaning is really that populist politicians propose policies that look as though they will benefit the less well-off, but which in fact do little of the sort, and which often benefit the politician and his cronies far more than the "people".  There is an unspoken silent adjective of "phony" in front of the word "populism" in most people's minds, and the term has had negative connotations ever since the days of the later Roman Empire. 

However you define it, though, populism certainly seems to be on the march.  I always thought of Juan Peron, the leader of Argentina, as the archetypal populist.  He (and his wife Eva) won the hearts of the working class and poor of Argentina by railing against the rich and powerful in society.  Given the deep divisions and class snobbery in Argentina at the time, this was a winning strategy and even had some moral justification.  However his economic policies were disastrous in the long run, while his style of personal rule and disregard for norms and institutions seems permanently to have tainted Argentinian politics to this day.  Christina Kirchner, the Peronist president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, was popular among the poorer parts of the electorate despite her personal corruption and the fact that her rule did little to improve the lot of those poor voters.

Nowadays there are a number of other populist leaders in power in various countries around the world, all with their own take on populism.  Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has been in power, first as prime minister and now as an executive president, for 15 years.  His populism is partly Islamist (appealing to the poor migrants from eastern Anatolia who feel looked down on by the secular Istanbul and Ankara middle classes), partly economic and largely nationalist.  The longer he has remained in power, the more authoritarian his rule has become and the more erratic his economic pronouncements have sounded.  The attempted coup in Turkey in 2016 has tipped him over the edge into paranoid repression, and it will be interesting to see how his popularity fares in the coming years.  He has gone out of his way to antagonize European leaders (particularly the Dutch and the Germans, both of whom he has publicly compared to Nazis), and after a brief love-fest with his fellow populist Donald Trump, the two have fallen out over the US failure to extradite Fethulleh Gulen to Turkey, and the Turkish failure to release an American pastor.

The Philippines has seen the rise of Rodrigo Duterte, a self-confessed mass murderer whose profanity-laden abuse for various world leaders, such as Barack Obama, seems to play well with his supporters in the Philippines.  His main claim to infamy is his support for large-scale extra-judicial killings of men said to be suspected drug dealers, and his previous direct involvement in such murders while he was the mayor of Davao.  Duterte’s populism is a mix of law-and-order repression and eccentric nationalism. 

In Venezuela, we may be witnessing the death throes of the populist Bolivarian Revolution started by the late Hugo Chavez in 1998.  Chavez’ regime always appealed to the poor of the country, held back by the extreme class and economic divisions in Venezuelan society.  His social welfare reforms, extending education, health care and other government services to the large underclass, were very popular among the lower socio-economic strata of society, even though they were hated by the wealthy elite who have always dominated the country.  Until Chavez’ death of cancer in 2013, the country’s vast oil revenues managed to pay for the state’s largesse, but since then his successor, Nicolas Maduro, has watched the country spiral into the abyss.  Violent crime is a huge concern, with Venezuela’s murder rate tied for the second highest in the world with Honduras; only El Salvador sees more murders.  Shop shelves are empty, inflation is rocketing out of control and tens of thousands of Venezuelans are fleeing to neighbouring countries.   The fate of Venezuela shows, I think, that unsustainable economic policies will always, eventually, fatally undermine any country.  As well, populism requires popular, charismatic leaders; Chavez was a compelling figure who inspired genuine affection, despite his long-windedness, while Maduro is wooden and unappealing.

          In Europe, almost every country seems to have populist movements that are gaining in popularity.  Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, the Sweden Democrats, the Alternative fur Deutschland and UKIP in the UK have all fallen short of taking power, although they are major players in their respective countries (with the exception of UKIP, now that the Brexit referendum is over).  All of these movements are based on anti-immigrant nativist sentiments and are more or less far-right in their political orientations, with some neo-fascist and neo-Nazi tendencies evident in their supporters.  Many of them make a great show of defending the Christian heritage of Europe from what they view as the menace of creeping Islamization of their countries.  They remind me a great deal of the anti-Catholic anti-immigrant movements in Canada and the US in the 1800s.  Most of them do not have strong economic beliefs; for them, cultural identity is their raison d’etre.

The European countries that give political moderates the heeby-jeebies at the moment are Poland, Hungary, Italy and (to a lesser degree) Austria.  Poland and Hungary have been in the grip of extreme nationalist populism for some years now, while Italy is now governed by a coalition of two very different populist movements, one left-wing and anarchist in conception, the other anti-immigrant, anti-southern and neofascist in style.  In Austria the far-right Austrian Freedom Party is a junior coalition partner in government.

Looking at Poland, it’s amazing that populism has thrived there for so long.  The first country behind the Iron Curtain successfully to throw off communism, Poland was a poster child for successful economic reforms and rising prosperity.  The election of the Law and Justice Party in 2005 was a serious surprise to outside observers, although their first spell in government only lasted two years.  Since their return to office in 2015, they have worked feverishly to implement measures designed to stifle opposition and swing the country far to the right socially.  They are militantly conservative in their social views (on women’s rights and abortion in particular) and very pro-Catholic and occasionally anti-Semitic.  They are strongly anti-immigrant, an ironic stand in a country that has seen almost no immigration, and which has historically sent millions of its citizens abroad as emigrants.  Polish friends of mine are horrified at the creeping freezing out of press freedom, judicial independence and right-wing nationalism, and I can certainly see why.  The current Polish government sees itself as the nucleus of a bloc of obstructionist, authoritarian illiberal democracies that are taking root in several post-Communist countries and posing a serious threat to the European Union through their flouting of EU norms and standards.

Hungary is another place where anti-immigrant, socially conservative populism has taken root under prime minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party.  In power since 2010, he has spent that time hollowing out the institutions of civic society, such as a free press, independent universities, the judiciary and electoral integrity.  Like the Law and Justice Party, Fidesz have wrapped themselves in religion, cultural identity and nationalism and thumbed their nose at the EU while eagerly accepting EU money for infrastructure projects that are riddled with corruption.  Visiting Hungary in 2015, I was struck by the contempt that educated urbanites had for Fidesz; they hated seeing their countrymen voluntarily giving up their hard-won freedoms.  Like Donald Trump, border security and walls to keep out Syrian migrants have played a large role in Fidesz election campaigns.  There is a nasty strain of anti-Semitism in Orban’s demonization of George Soros as the anti-Christ of the globalist elite (Soros is Jewish); ironically, Orban accepted a scholarship from Soros’ Open Society Initiative to study abroad in the UK a few decades ago.  The fact that 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled the country after the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets and were welcomed with open arms by western countries makes the current rabid anti-migrant stand particularly inconsistent.

Italy is a particularly worrisome case.  The Northern League, founded in 1991 by Umberto Bossi and now led by Matteo Salvini, has had a chequered past.  They were founded as a populist movement of northern Italians who felt that the prosperous north was subsidizing what they regarded as lazy and feckless southern Italians, and that northern Italy should secede as an independent state.  They have completely rebranded themselves as Euro-skeptics and virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Roma, and no longer denigrate southern Italians.  Their partners in government, the Five Star Movement, are curious bedfellows for the Northern League.  Founded as an anti-establishment movement by comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009, it railed against the corruption endemic to Italian politics.  Although it has now adopted anti-immigrant policies, it also embraces environmentalism and the concept of a basic minimum income that are more traditionally associated with more left-wing parties, as well as an anti-vaccination stance that strikes me as almost criminally stupid.  The first few months of the coalition have seen Italy trying to close its ports to migrant rescue boats in the Mediterranean and a scheme to take a census of Roma in the country with the aim of expelling as many as possible.  The Euro-skepticism runs deep, and in a country that was one of the 6 original founding states of what is now the EU, there is a real risk that the government may try to carry out their own version of Brexit.

One more populist who is worth considering is Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand.  Although he was deposed from power in a coup in 2006, and his sister was overthrown in 2014, his style of populism seems to have influenced the current generation in various ways.  He was, like Donald Trump, immensely personally wealthy before entering politics.  His money, along with his control of much of the media, helped him to power in 2001.  His populism was very much economic, trying to improve the lot of poorer rural Thai farmers at the expense of the Bangkok middle class elite.  He made himself very popular, rather like Chavez, with schemes to improve rural incomes, and this solid rural support made his party electorally invincible.  He also, like Duterte, was associated with a campaign against drug dealers that resulted in hundreds of deaths at the hands of police.  I was living next door in Myanmar when the 2006 coup occurred, and I have followed the following episodes of unrest, military coups and repression with depressed fascination.  The country is still deeply divided between the urban elite and the rural masses, with the military siding with the urbanites and wrapping themselves in Thai nationalism and the royal family.  In this case, Thaksin, although one of the richest men in the country, governed more in the left-wing style of Hugo Chavez than the nationalist fervour of current European populists.

India’s Narendra Modi has his own flavour of populism.  His party is associated with extreme pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim (and anti-Christian) religious groups such as the Shiv Sena.  His party’s involvement in the mass pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 attests to the strength of religious chauvinism underlying his populism.  Economically he is far more right wing and pro-business than many other populists, and his party’s electoral success has much to do with rising prosperity levels and economic growth (a stark contrast to the case in Venezuela).  Educated urban Indians are generally not huge fans of Modi and his illiberal tendencies, but he seems to be electorally invulnerable at the moment.

This brings us, inevitably, to Donald Trump, the most unlikely of populists.  Like Thaksin and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, his wealth and media personality were huge factors in his rise.  Trump somehow managed to convince working-class white voters to support him by promising unrealistic things:  a border wall with Mexico, the return of high-paying industrial and coal-mining jobs to economically depressed areas, the renegotiation of trade deals to benefit America, an America First economic and foreign policy based on a strange zero-sum-game worldview forged in the “screw them before they screw you” world of New York real estate.  Trump’s erratic behaviour and his traditional Republican policies of soaking the poor to benefit the rich through tax cuts have so far not affected his millions of adoring fans, although it will be interesting to see what happens if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives (likely) and the Senate (far less likely) in November’s mid-term elections. 

Trump’s main effect on the world so far has been to weaken, perhaps fatally, the network of alliances and agreements that have underpinned much of the post-WWII world order.  Many of these effects have not yet been felt, but the urge to tear down and destroy seems deep-seated in Trump and in some of his strategists such as the departed Steve Bannon and his advisor Stephen Miller. 

One common theme running through all these populists is that their electoral success is often based on promising unrealistically simple solutions to complicated problems.  Trump in particular reminds me of a stereotypical character, the bigoted uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving dinner, gets drunk and spends the night opining loudly about women, blacks and immigrants and telling racist jokes while everyone else squirms in embarrassment.  I suppose that as democracies we get the leaders we deserve; it’s up to ourselves as societies to improve enough that we end up deserving much better, more thoughtful leaders.  Until then, I am seriously worried about the fate of other countries who might fall under the spell of cheap nationalistic populism.  (I am particularly worried about my native Canada and the unspeakable Rob and Doug Ford and characters on the federal stage such as Maxime Bernier.)