The ghost of populism

The term populism has become recurrent in politics and journalism, it appears regularly in the mass media among anchors, reporters and columnists, and is also used with some frequency by public officials, popular representatives and political parties.

Despite its daily use, there seems to be no general agreement on the concrete meaning of populism, as every time it is used it usually falls into the realm of ambiguity. "Populist" is a label that is often put very lightly in public discussion. There is a diversity of values, forms and objectives related to the concept, such as welfarism, demagogy or lying, among others. Often, the expression is used in a pejorative way or to denigrate, it is projected as a kind of ghost to be feared or rejected, although in recent years there have also appeared those who vindicate it. Depending on the context and the person or organization that enunciates it, it means something different. So, what is populism? In the face of these confusions and ambiguities, social theory can bring clarity to such a diffuse concept. Authors such as Enrique Dussel, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Íñigo Errejón have worked on this concept in various texts.

The term populism emerged in Russia between 1860 and 1880, when the peasant movement Narodnik, usually translated as "populist," emerged as an opposition to the tsarist government. At the end of the 19th century, a political movement also of peasant origin emerged in the United States, which confronted bipartisanship and was called Prairie populism or Prairie Populism by its critics and historians. With this pair of antecedents, the term populism began to be used in political circles, the media and academia.

In the last 20 years, theoretical efforts have appeared to give greater clarity to the concept. Laclau considers that populism appears fundamentally when a leader or an organization invokes the "people" to actively assume the role of representative of their demands, establishing a symbolic and political nexus. What is inherent to populism, its core of thought and operation is then the constant construction of a leader-people link.

Laclau clarifies that in politics and law there are two ways of understanding the concept of "people". First, as the totality of the community of a State; and second, as the less privileged sectors of the entire population. In populism, the leader usually calls upon the sector of the population that is located in this second notion of "people". This part of the population, although usually the most extensive, is also diverse in its origins, concerns and needs. Laclau and Mouffe consider then that the concept of "people" is the discursive articulation capable of agglutinating the different social sectors and their demands. The "people" is an elocution that constructs a "we", that engages and achieves the adhesion of the masses to a political project.

For Laclau, the basis of populism is the "formation" of "The people", this is articulated when a series of demands or claims of that diverse population manage to unify in opposition to an element formed in singular, for example "the oligarchy". When this series of demands come together, what he calls "equivalence" or "equivalential moment" arises: all popular demands have the same weight, the same validity, they are equally important. When these equivalences are picked up and championed by a movement or political figure and the claimants consider this actor as a legitimate standard-bearer, a link is formed. This search for and consolidation of the political leader-people link is called populism, which is neither good nor bad in itself, it is simply, as Laclau would say, "a way of constructing the political".