ARTICLE
Populism in Europe: An Illiberal Democratic
Response to Undemocratic Liberalism
(The Government and Opposition/Leonard
Schapiro Lecture 2019)
Cas Mudde
Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, US
Corresponding author. Email: mudde@uga.edu
(Received 12 February 2021; revised 1 April 2021; accepted 13 April 2021;
first published online 7 June 2021)
Abstract
In this lecture, I lay out my approach to populism, which falls within the now dominant
‘ideational approach’of populism, discuss the complex relationship between populism and
politics, and identify some of the main causes of the ongoing ‘populist Zeitgeist’. My main
arguments are: (1) while populism is related to (real and perceived) ‘crises’, these so-called
‘crises’are often catalysts rather than prime causes of the rise of populism; (2) populism is
essentially an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism; and (3) populism
can only be overcome by more rather than less liberal democracy. I illustrate my argu-
ments on the basis of the recent rise of populism in Europe, but believe they also largely
hold true beyond that specific regional and temporal context.
Keywords: populism; political parties; liberal democracy; Europe
Allow me to start this lecturewith a personal anecdote that is directly related to this lec-
ture, and to the article that started it all, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, published in this journal
more than 15 years ago now (Mudde 2004). I had been studying the far right for a few
years and was working on my PhD, when I started thinking about the term populism, as
it was becoming more used, in particular because of the ground-breaking work of
Hans-Georg Betz (1994). Still, I was not overly convinced by his functionalistdefinition,
focused heavily on the ‘instrumentalization’of ‘resentment’. So, I tried to look for some
other people and, in the end, I went to Margaret Canovan (1981), whose work has been
very influential within populism studies, even though she never really clearly defined
the concept. Which brought me to the work of Ernesto Laclau. I read, or thought
I read, his 1977 book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism –Fascism –
Populism, but just could not make head nor tail of it (Laclau 1977). I had no clue
what he was writing and, after accepting intellectual defeat, decided not to use the
term populism, as, clearly, I was not smart enough to grasp its meaning.
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited
Government and Opposition (2021), 56, 577–597
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Little changed until I moved to the University of Antwerp, where I co-supervised
a graduate student, Jan Jagers, who was working on a PhD on populism within
Flemish parties (Jagers 2006). We had many discussions about populism, develop-
ing separate, if overlapping, conceptualizations of it. One day, I went back to Leiden
University, my alma mater, and met up with my former PhD supervisor, the late
great Peter Mair. I told him, ‘So, I’ve been thinking about populism lately, and
I think we live in a populist Zeitgeist.’He almost jumped up and said, ‘Populist
Zeitgeist, that’s perfect, write an article about that.’I responded that I only had a
definition of populism and a general idea of a populist Zeitgeist at the moment,
but he insisted I write an article. ‘With a title like that, it will be cited a lot’,he
said, which turned out to be true. Although, interestingly, it was not cited that
much in the first 10 years and only really took off more recently, in particular
since the annus horriblis 2016, in which Brexit and Trump shocked the world,
and ‘populism studies’exploded (Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017a).
In this lecture I want to lay out my own approach to populism, which falls within
the now dominant ‘ideational approach’(Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017;
Mudde 2017), discuss the complex relationship between populism and politics,
and identify some of the main causes of the ongoing ‘populist Zeitgeist’.My
main arguments are: (1) while populism is related to (real and perceived) ‘crises’,
crises are often catalysts rather than prime causes; (2) populism is essentially an
illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism; and (3) populism can
only be overcome by more rather than less liberal democracy.
Populism: a definition
In my 2004 article I presented a new definition of populism that has since been
used by a growing group of scholars and non-scholars –although it is important
to note that there are also many who reject it (e.g. Aslanidis 2016; Freeden
2017). There is little doubt, however, that the ideational approach, in which popu-
lism is seen as a set of ideas centred on the notion that ‘the people’are opposed to
‘the elite’, has reached a status that is as close to a consensus as academic
approaches get.
1
One of the few popular alternative approaches is the Laclauan
approach (Laclau 2005; see also Borriello and Jäger 2020), which is often referred
to as ‘formal-discursive’(e.g. Stavrakakis et al. 2018), even if the differences between
‘ideational’and ‘Laclauan’scholars are often much smaller in empirical studies than
the literature makes them out to be.
2
While the ideational approach defines populism as a set of ideas, I specifically
define it as a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated
into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt
elite, which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale
(general will) of the people (Mudde 2004: 543). Let me briefly discuss a few specific
aspects of my definition.
First of all, I call it a ‘thin-centred’ideology, rather than an ideology per se,
because populism alone does not tell us that much about what type of world
populists want, like ‘thick-centred’ideologies such as liberalism and socialism
do.
3
At the same time, I consider it a type of ideology, however limited, rather
than just a ‘discourse’or ‘style’, because it is not just an instrument for coming
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to power. It actually also informs policies when populists come to power or when
they are empowered, as we can see from Hungary to Venezuela (e.g.
Garcia-Guadilla and Mallen 2019; Mudde 2021; Palonen 2018).
Second, the basis of populism, in my understanding, is monism and moralism
(see, in more detail, Mudde 2017). Populism is a monist ideology in that it sees
‘the people’as one, with each individual member of ‘the people’sharing exactly
the same key interests and values. Populists do not believe in pluralism –that
is, the view that society exists of different groups with diverse legitimate interests
and where politics should find some type of consensus among (most of) these
groups. For populists, there are only two groups, and only one is legitimate, because
the elite are corrupt and therefore do not deserve the rights and protections of a
legitimate opposition. This is not to say that populists do not distinguish between
different groups on the basis of criteria such as class, ethnicity or religion, but rather
that they argue that these citeria are secondary. Moreover, many populists argue
that only one of these class, ethnic or religious groups is part of ‘the people’–
for instance, in the discourse of many of the original American populists, ‘the peo-
ple’were white Christian farmers.
In addition to monism, moralism is central to my understanding of populism.
For populists the distinction between the people and the elite is a moral one; it
is about being morally pure versus morally corrupt. In other words, it is not
about whether you have power or whether you have money. It is also not a class
distinction. This explains why so many populist leaders are actually very wealthy,
and some have been in power (e.g. Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand) or close to
power (e.g. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy) –in other words, most populists are insider-
outsiders rather than true outsiders (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017).
Wealth and power in themselves do not make one part of ‘the elite’. What
makes you part of the elite is having the wrong values, which today is often cap-
tured by terms such as ‘cosmopolitanism’, particularly among right-wing populists.
Third, monism and moralism are at the heart of the complex and controversial
issue of the relationship between populism and democracy. Based upon my defin-
ition, populism is not necessarily bad for democracy, but it depends on the form (of
democracy rather than of populism). In short, populism is pro-democracy but
anti-liberal democracy. Very simply stated, if you see democracy in the
Schumpeterian interpretation,
4
it is about popular sovereignty and majority rule,
which means that in a democratic system the people elect their leaders through a
majority and that is it. Of course, what we generally talk about when we use the
term democracy is much more than that, but technically that is liberal democracy,
which combines popular sovereignty and majority rule with the protection of
minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers (e.g. Diamond 2003;
Mouffe 2000). It is with those liberal protections that populism has a problem
and the key reasons are their monism and moralism. When you believe that the
people are homogeneous and that the only other group is the elite, which is corrupt,
then there are no legitimate minority rights, because there is no legitimate minority.
And if politics should be ‘the general will of the people’then nothing can stand
above that, not even a Supreme Court.
Fourth, populism is in itself neither left nor right, but most populist actors are.
Whether populist parties or politicians are left or right depends not on their
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populism but on their host ideology, often a ‘thick-centred’one. Almost all success-
ful populists combine populism with a host ideology (see Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser 2017). Populist radical right parties such as the Alternative for
Germany (AfD) or the Indian People’s Party (BJP) combine it with nativism,
while left populist parties such as the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left
(SYRIZA) or the South African Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) combine it
with some form of socialism.
Fifth, and final, populism is usually secondary to the host ideology. One of the
few exceptions is the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), whose ‘eclectic populism’
does not seem to have a stable host ideology (Mosca and Tronconi 2019). Almost
all other populist parties are something else first and populist second. The Austrian
Freedom Party (FPÖ) and Fidesz in Hungary are nativist first and populist second.
Similarly, the Spanish Podemos and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela
(PSUV) are socialist first, at least in name, and populist second. So, while this
might be frustrating, it is very important to remember that populism can tell us
only part of the story about ‘the rise of populism’. When we want to understand
the rise of the populist radical right or of left populist parties, populism is one
part of the puzzle, and often only a minor part at that.
The political paradox of populism
That being said, there is something interesting to the rise of populism. If we think
of the early 20th century, then most nativist and socialist movements were not
populist. They were almost all elitist in some manner –that is, either extremist
(i.e. anti-democratic) or paternalistic. Think about the various fascist movements
and regimes, which abhorred democracy as rule of the ‘mediocre’or ‘weak’,or
the Marxism–Leninist parties and regimes, which believed that the Communist
Party was the vanguard of the working class and supported a ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’. Today, the main opposition to mainstream, liberal democratic politics
is populist and I think that is something that we should think about much more.
For one of my courses, I was reading the great Seymour Martin Lipset, which really
should be read by pretty much everyone and not just his classic Political Man (1960).
Notably, in 1955, Lipset published an article on the radical right in America in the
British Journal of Sociology that still offers the best explanation of the Trump phenom-
enon more than half a century later (Lipset 1955). But in another ground-breaking
piece, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’, he wrote that ‘the characteristic pattern
of stable western democracies in the mid-20th century is that of a “post-politics”phase
–there is a little difference between the democratic left and right’(Lipset 1959: 100). I
see the rise of populism very much in this context of what Lipset called ‘post-politics’,
or what Arend Lijphart (1977)called‘depolarization’two decades later.
In what I see as the political paradox of populism, I am very much inspired by
two of the smartest scholars who have written about populism. The first is Margaret
Canovan, who sadly passed away in 2018, but who has been massively influential to
me, and the broader field, and is in many ways the real intellectual doyenne of con-
temporary populism studies (notably Canovan 1999). The second is Chantal
Mouffe, who has a different interpretation of populism from mine, but whose ana-
lysis of liberal democracy has really been spot-on (notably Mouffe 2000). To be
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clear, I do not claim that Canovan or Mouffe see or saw the same paradox, but
I would not have been able to see it myself without the foundational work of
these two exceptional scholars.
The political paradox of populism is that populism is both at once anti-political
and über-political. It is anti-political in the sense that it denies legitimate oppos-
ition –given that politics is about distribution of power and finding a kind of com-
promise or solution to different positions. As Jan Werner Müller (2016: 3) has
summarized so cogently, ‘they and they alone represent the people’. For populists
there is no politics because (all) ‘the people’are one. There is no reason to have
deliberation or compromise, because if I am one of the people, then, what I
think is good, all other members of ‘the people’will think it is good too, as we
all share the same core interests and values. At the same time, populism is
über-political in that it considers everything subject to the will of the people.
After all, politics should be an expression of ‘the general will of the people’and
nothing stands above that. In practice, it is the (re)politicization of politics that is
at the heart of the populist claim.
As I will argue below, in essence, contemporary populism is an illiberal demo-
cratic response to undemocratic liberalism. It is a response to the depoliticization of
politics, which has characterized (European) politics for at least four decades now.
Where most mainstream politicians have increasingly been saying, ‘we cannot
decide that’or ‘There Is No Alternative’(TINA), populists have responded by stat-
ing that everything is political. If the majority wants something, they have a demo-
cratic right to it. However, it is illiberal democratic, because, as argued above, it
fundamentally rejects any type of limitation on the power of the majority. In a
sense, it is a form of majoritarian extremism.
Before I discuss the key structural causes of the current populist Zeitgeist, let me
sketch a short historical background of populism in Europe.
A short history of populism in Europe
Populism emerged in Europe in the mid-19th century with the Narodniki in Tsarist
Russia, a small urban intellectual movement that left the city for the country to tell
the peasants, ‘You are the real people, you should have the power’. To their surprise,
the peasants responded by saying, ‘I don’t really believe you and I need to work
because otherwise I will die of hunger’. So, the populists decided to kill the tsar
instead, which led to brutal repression and the (literal) death of the Narodniki
and that was pretty much the story (Wortman 1967). The Narodniki had some
influence in parts of Eastern Europe in the early 20th century (see Held 1996),
but overall populism remained largely dormant within Europe until the 1980s.
There have been some local populist episodes in the early post-war period, such
as the Poujadists in France, anti-tax parties in Denmark and Norway, and the
Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in Greece, but populism only gained
broader relevance within (Western) Europe in the late 1980s, and more specifically
the mid-1990s, with the rise of parties such as the French National Front (Betz
1994). The FN (now RN) was pretty much the prototype of what I have called
the ‘populist radical right’party (Mudde 2007). While now largely forgotten, parties
like the FN and FPÖ already got some 15% of the national vote in the mid-1990s.
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In fact, the FPÖ received its record score not in 2017 but in 1999, when it gained
26.7% of the national vote.
The Great Recession boosted populism of both the left and the right, although
not as much as is often assumed (see below). It gave a particular boost on the left,
where broad anti-austerity protests led to the creation of Podemos in Spain and
elevated SYRIZA from a marginal to a major party in Greece. While it also bene-
fited some populist radical right parties, the overall effect of the Great Recession
upon the populist radical right was fairly small (Mudde 2016). Roughly as many
populist radical right parties experienced an increase as a decrease in their electoral
support.
As illustrated in Figure 1, populist parties were fairly marginal in Europe until
the 1980s and only started to increase their support in the 1990s. Since then,
they have been trending upwards, quite rapidly in the 2010s, now averaging roughly
25% of the vote in national parliamentary elections within the European Union
(plus UK).
5
While this is significant, it is still just a fraction of the ‘general will’,
which makes the massive literature on populism in general, and populist parties
in particular, disproportionate at best, and excessive at worst.
But while support for populist parties is now almost Europe-wide, it is still very
uneven across the continent. Table 1 provides an overview of the electoral support
for populist parties in national elections in all EU countries (plus the UK). The first
column contains the name of the country, the second the name of the biggest suc-
cessful populist party in the country, the third that party’s result in the last national
election (before 2021), the fourth the total support for all populist parties in that
country, the fifth the change in total populist support between the last and the pre-
ceding national elections, and the sixth the change in total support between the first
post-crisis and the last pre-crisis national elections.
6
Let’s first look at the averages and trends. On average, the biggest populist party
gains 17.4% of the votes, while the average total vote for populist parties is 25.5%.
In other words, on average, one in four EU citizens votes for a populist party in
national elections –incidentally, the average support is not much higher in
European elections. The trend is up, with populist parties winning, on average,
3.8% of the vote more in the last national election than in the one preceding it.
However, there are massive differences within the EU. For instance, the biggest
populist party won almost half of the vote in the last national election (Fidesz
with 47.9%), although they were hardly ‘free and fair’(ODHIR 2018), while the
smallest won less than 1% (MPM with 0.4%). Similarly, the total populist vote
ranges from more than two-thirds (Hungary with 71.2%) to less than 1% (Malta
with 0.4%).
Moreover, the averages are pushed up by a relatively small number of countries,
as only one-third of countries (9 of the 28) have a total populist vote that is above
the average of 25.5%. In four countries the (vast) majority of the population votes
for a populist party (Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Slovenia), even if they are often
divided over very different varieties of populism in each country (from radical left
to radical right). And in only six countries the total populist vote is still in single
digits. In the past five years, the total populist vote went up in 20 of the 28 coun-
tries, more than 70%, but in only 10 substantially (i.e. by more than 5%).
7
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Almost all theories of populism argue that populists thrive during ‘crises’, real or
perceived (Moffitt 2016), even though the concept of ‘crisis’remains one of the least
clearly defined and theorized in the political science literature. It is therefore not
surprising that the Great Recession was broadly seen to have been a big boon for
populism. But, as so often, the picture was much more nuanced than received wis-
dom would have it (for an excellent study, see Kriesi and Pappas 2015). On average,
populist parties gained 4.7% during the Great Recession, which is substantial, but
not that striking. Only in eight countries did the total populist vote increase signifi-
cantly –that is, by more than 10%. Interestingly, the average in the 16 Eurozone
countries (of that time) is only 0.1% higher. Perhaps most surprising is the fact
that three of the five countries that received EU bailouts saw no change in the popu-
list vote. This is not to say there is no effect from economic crises on support for
populist parties, but rather that it might be delayed –as Béla Greskovits (1998)
already argued a decade before the Great Recession, based on the Latin
American experience of the late 20th century. This delayed populist surge has
been most striking in Spain (with first Podemos and then VOX) and seems to
have started more recently in Portugal too (with Chega).
So, if ‘crises’are the catalysts rather than the causes of the rise of populism, what
does explain the relatively recent rise of support for populist parties in Europe?
Structural causes for the populist Zeitgeist
Populism feeds off the inherent tensions of liberal democracy, most notably
between majority rule and minority rights (Abts and Rummens 2007; Mouffe
2000). While it profits from (real or perceived) economic and political crises, like
the Great Recession, its relatively recent rise has more structural causes. Brought
back to the core, the current populist Zeitgeist is a consequence of a structural
transformation that has (at least) three key aspects: (1) the rise of undemocratic
Figure 1. Average Electoral Support for European Populist Parties by Decade
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Table 1. Support for Populist Parties in EU Member States (+UK) in Last Parliamentary Elections
a
Country Biggest populist party
%
party
%
total
% total
change
last
% total
change
crisis
Austria Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) 16.2 16.2 −9.8 +11.8
Belgium Flemish Interest (VB) 12.0 13.1 +7.5 −6.0
Bulgaria Citizens for European
Development of Bulgaria (GERB)
32.7 41.7 −8.7 +17.1
Croatia
b
Bridge of Independent Lists
(MOST)
7.4 7.8 −2.5 −3.5
Cyprus Citizens’Alliance (SYM/SYPOL) 6.0 6.0 +6.0 0.0
Czech Republic Action of Dissatisfied Citizens
(ANO 2011)
29.6 42.0 +14.0 +11.7
Denmark Danish People’s Party (DF) 8.7 11.1 −10.0 −1.6
Estonia Estonian Conservative People’s
Party (EKRE)
17.8 17.8 +9.7 0.0
Finland Finns Party (PS) 17.5 18.5 −0.7 +15.0
France National Front/Rally (FN/RN) 13.2 24.2 +3.7 +16.2
Germany Alternative for Germany (AfD) 12.6 21.8 +11.7 +3.1
Greece Coalition of the Radical Left
(SYRIZA)
31.5 38.7 −0.5 +21.5
Hungary Fidesz-Hungarian Civic
Movement (Fidesz)
47.9 71.2 +6.2 +25.1
Ireland Sinn Féin (SF) 24.5 24.5 +10.7 +3.0
Italy Five Star Movement (M5S) 32.7 68.4 +15.2 +26.3
Latvia Who Owns the State? (KPV LV) 14.3 14.3 +14.3 0.0
Lithuania Labour Party (DP) 9.8 15.4 +4.7 +4.7
Luxembourg Alternative Democratic Reform
Party (ADR)
8.3 8.3 +1.7 −3.4
Malta Maltese Patriots Movement
(MPM)
0.4 0.4 +0.4 0.0
Netherlands Party for Freedom (PVV) 13.1 24.0 +4.2 −2.8
Poland Law and Justice (PiS) 43.6 43.6 −2.8 −3.8
Portugal Enough! (CH) 1.3 1.3 +1.3 0.0
Romania Greater Romania Party (PRM) 0.6 0.6 −0.4 +1.9
Slovakia Ordinary People and
Independent Personalities
(OL’ANO)
25.0 54.7 +0.1 −1.0
Slovenia Slovenian Democratic Party
(SDS)
24.9 51.6 +22.7 −7.4
Spain VOX 15.1 27.9 +3.3 0.0
(Continued)
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liberalism; (2) a change in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled; and (3)
the democratization of the media. While theoretically and empirically separate,
these aspects are interconnected, thereby strengthening their collective effect.
The rise of undemocratic liberalism is debated under many different terms,
including ‘neoliberal globalization’,‘post-democracy’and ‘technocracy’(e.g.
Crouch 2000; Mair 2013; Radaelli 2013). While many of these terms, and linked
debates, focus almost exclusively on the economic dimension, I believe that the
process of undemocratic liberalism goes well beyond neoliberal economics.
While it is true that depoliticization had a particularly strong effect on the eco-
nomic sector, through privatization and deregulation, many non-economic
aspects were also ‘liberalized’. Abortion and the death penalty are good examples
of controversial issues that have become legalized in most European countries.
Over the past decades, a lot of economic and political issues have become legal
issues, which means they have been taken out of the political, most notably
electoral, arena.
Formally, this was done democratically, but often only in the narrowest sense.
While the politicians who implemented these policies were elected democratically
–in free and fair elections –many of these decisions were taken largely without a
public debate. As most political parties did not campaign on them, and sometimes
did not even mention the policies in their election programmes, the decisions were
made outside of popular control. This meant that most people had no real voice in
the decision, as either the issue was not on the political agenda or most (major)
parties held almost identical positions. Unsurprising, then, that many people are
not even aware of some of these decisions.
Probably the best example of a liberal policy that was supported by all major
mainstream parties, but kept from the political agenda for decades, is immigration.
While immigration pre-dates the ‘neoliberal era’, it only became politicized in most
European countries in the 1990s, with the electoral breakthrough of populist radical
right parties. For decades, immigration policies, from ‘guest workers’to East
European ‘refugees’to family reunion, were made outside of the electoral arena.
Most immigration politics was democratic in process but undemocratic in spirit.
They went against the spirit of democracy, in which the population debates policies
and only then do the politicians make decisions on them.
Table 1. (Continued.)
Country Biggest populist party
%
party
%
total
% total
change
last
% total
change
crisis
Sweden Sweden Democrats (SD) 17.5 17.5 +4.6 +2.8
UK Brexit Party 2.0 3.2 +0.7 0.0
Average 17.425.5+3.8+4.7
Notes:
a
I have followed the Popu-List for the classification of populist parties (Rooduijn et al. 2019). The last year to be
included for national elections data is 2020.
b
The scores for Croatia are particularly difficult to calculate, as most populist parties are small and part of larger,
non-populist, coalitions.
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The process of European integration is another good example of undemocratic
liberalism (see Parsons and Weber 2011). For decades European policies were made
on the assumption that there was a so-called ‘permissive consensus’within the
European populations (Hooghe and Marks 2009) which ‘legitimized’the
pro-integration policies of the political elites –there might have been, but we
will never know for sure, because public opinion polling on the topic remained
fairly limited until the 1990s. The idea is that the European peoples did not
know much about the process of European integration, but overall supported the
content and direction of the process. Given the broad range of Euroscepticism
that has become visible since European integration has become (reluctantly) poli-
ticized, again mostly by populist parties (de Vries 2018; Taggart 2004), it is highly
likely that some key decisions would not have had majority support among the
European peoples.
The most striking recent example is the Banking Union decision, a reaction to
the chaotic and controversial EU fiscal responses to the Great Recession, which,
simply stated, transfers the responsibility for banking policy from the national to
the European level (see Baglioni 2016). Although this decision has been called
‘one of the most significant developments in European integration since the agree-
ment on Economic and Monetary Union in the Maastricht Treaty’(Howarth and
Quaglia 2014: 125), it was discussed and decided almost exclusively outside of the
democratic –that is, electoral –realm. Moreover, some of the key decisions about
the specific mechanisms (the Single Supervision Mechanism (SSM) and the Single
Resolutions Mechanism (SRM)) were only approved months before the 2014
European elections. So, while the decision was democratic in a purely procedural
interpretation, it was not in a more substantial one. If the European elites had really
wanted to have a popular mandate for their decision, they should have made the
Banking Union a key issue in the election campaign. What better source of demo-
cratic legitimacy could there be?
Even after the ‘Integration Consensus’of European integration, neoliberal eco-
nomics and multi-ethnic societies was challenged by political newcomers, almost
exclusively populist parties, most mainstream politicians responded with TINA pol-
itics. From the centre left to the centre right, fundamentally political decisions were
depoliticized by the essentially anti-political argument that ‘there is no alternative’.
For instance, at the 2005 Labour Conference, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
said, ‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as
well debate whether autumn should follow summer’(Blair 2005). Similarly, eight
years later, and under pressure to defend his harsh austerity policies, his Tory ‘suc-
cessor’David Cameron said, ‘There is no alternative that will secure our country’s
future’(Parker 2013).
In his posthumous masterpiece Ruling the Void, Peter Mair (2013) has explained
this ‘hollowing of western democracy’by the increased preference of ‘responsible
politics’over ‘responsive politics’among mainstream governments and political
parties. Responsive politics mean that governments and parties do what their voters
want. Responsible politics mean that they do what they believe is ‘responsible’,
which in the neoliberal era has become primarily defined by neoliberal economic
theory and the whims of the international markets. In many cases, the consequence
of ‘responsible politics’is depoliticization. Policies are taken out of the political
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(electoral) arena through privatization, through politically independent ‘expert’
committees and institutions (like most central banks), or by killing the political
debate by saying that ‘there is no alternative’(see, among many others, Mouffe
2000; Streeck 2016).
Undoubtedly related to this process, we are now living in a period of nostalgia.
Almost all major political camps are nostalgic for some previous era: the populist
radical right for the 1950s, the (populist) ‘radical’left for the 1960s, and the centre
left and centre right for the 1980s and 1990s.
8
What we often forget, however, is
that for most of the 20th century, at least in Europe, politics was quite elitist, or
better paternalistic, with most of the (cultural, economic and political) elites dis-
trusting the people. It was distrust of ‘the people’that explains why democracy
was introduced so gradually and slowly in Western Europe (e.g. de Dijn 2020).
Even after universal suffrage was finally introduced, in the early 20th century,
many elites saw their fears confirmed in the Weimar Republic, as received wisdom
has it that ‘the people’abolished democracy by voting the Nazis into power. No
matter that ‘only’one-third of the people had voted for the Nazis and that Adolf
Hitler could only come to power because of collaboration by conservative elites
(Capoccia 2005; Ziblatt 2017). As elitism softened into paternalism in the post-war
period, elites remained convinced that they knew better than the people what was
good for them, while most people seemed fine with that, having been socialized into
the same paternalistic spirit by churches, schools and trade unions.
This situation is gradually coming to an end as a consequence of the ‘silent
revolution’(Inglehart 1977). As post-war generations increasingly grew up under
conditions of economic affluence and physical security, they developed
‘post-materialist’priorities. A less mentioned aspect of this development is what
Ronald Inglehart has called ‘cognitive mobilization’, which means that new
generations have become better educated and have developed more political efficacy
or self-consciousness. As a consequence, post-materialist generations are less defer-
ential to power and feel that they can make political decisions as well, or even bet-
ter, than the political elites.
At the same time, we have seen the rise of a ‘political class’, an increasingly
closed and homogeneous group of professional politicians (e.g. Aberbach et al.
1981; von Beyme 1996; Borchert and Zeiss 2003; Cotta and Best 2007). While it
is important to acknowledge that politicians have become more diverse in some
respects, most notably in terms of gender but also, albeit to an even lesser extent,
sexuality and ethnicity (e.g. Dancygier 2017; Kittilson 2006), professional politi-
cians have become more and more homogeneous in terms of class as well as
level of education (Gaxie and Godmer 2007).
9
Irrespective of party ideology, the
average ‘career politician’today comes from an (upper) middle-class background,
is a university graduate and comes from a ‘brokerage occupation’like journalism
or law (Norris 1999). This is even the case for Christian democratic and social
democratic parties, which used to have much broader representation, most notably
by farmers and workers, respectively. Today, most workers tend to be found in the
representation of communist parties and, ironically, populist radical right parties.
10
These conflicting processes have reshaped the most fundamental relationship in
a democracy, that between the rulers (elites) and the ruled (masses/people). While
the masses have become much more democratized, for the first time feeling that
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they are (or should be) equal participants in the democratic process, the elites have
become more homogeneous and segregated, in terms of their sociodemographic
characteristics. Moreover, in the neoliberal era, political elites have become more
elitist in a ‘technocratic’sense, believing that more and more things should be
decided by ‘experts’, most notably (neoliberal) economic experts and within the
EU (see Radaelli 2013).
Finally, politics has changed fundamentally because of the democratization of
the media. For much of the 20th century, European media were either controlled
by the state or by major political actors such as churches, political parties and
trade unions. Radio and later television were almost exclusively publicly owned
and operated, and while the level of political influence differed significantly (not
just between the East and West, but also within the West), ultimate control rested
with the mainstream parties. The rise of private media changed not just the media
landscape but also the media logic (e.g. Mazzoleni 2008).
Private television emerged in much of Europe in the 1980s and had a massive
effect on what people could and did watch (see Michalis 2013). During the same
time, many of the newspapers were also privatized, losing financial backing from
mainstream political actors, which changed their media logic. Traditional media
outlets no longer simply had to report the news, within the limits set by their main-
stream backers and controllers, but they had to make money too. As traditional
media started to ‘chase eyeballs’, they increasingly copied the content and style
of the private media, which shows a strong overlap with that of (radical right)
populists (Ellinas 2010).
On the one hand, this process had a democratizing effect on the media in terms
of control, as the old elites, which could largely decide what was or was not
addressed in the media, lost much of their gatekeeping power (Bro and Wallberg
2014). On the other hand, it created new gatekeepers, mostly economic elites,
and led to a different narrowing of the issues addressed. After all, we all know
what sells: scandals and controversy (Tumber 1993). And populists offer that in
multitude. So, without traditional gatekeepers and with a new media logic, populists
became a rare political milk cow for the highly competitive and chronically under-
funded private media. This allowed the more media-savvy populists to help set the
political agenda, further benefiting them electorally (e.g. Mazzoleni et al. 2003;
Walgrave and De Swert 2004; Wettstein et al. 2018).
The agenda-setting and gatekeeping functions of the traditional elites are further
eroded by the rising importance of social media. This is what I call the Bieber effect.
Justin Bieber was a massive star on YouTube first. And anything that is big on
social media, like Twitter and YouTube, is going to find its way into the traditional
media. Populism has an ‘elective affinity’with social media, among others in their
shared ‘rebellious narrative’(Gerbaudo 2018), which might explain why many
populist actors and arguments are disproportionately visible on social media
(e.g. Alonso-Muñoz and Casero-Ripollés 2018; Engesser et al. 2017), often seeming
much more popular than they actually are in the real world. Given that journalists,
who are disproportionately active on social media like Twitter, are heavily influ-
enced in their choice and framing of their news stories by the Twitter accounts
they follow (see Wihbey et al. 2017), they (unwittingly) help amplify the messages
and relevance of populists.
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Still, it is important not to overstate the importance of social media. So far, most
research shows that social media intensifies opinions rather than changes them.
Moreover, regular social media use is still limited to small parts of the broader
population. While a majority of Europeans are on Facebook, except in Germany,
there are important generational variations (de Best 2018). Moreover, participation
on other social media platforms is much lower. For instance, in October 2020, the
European country with the largest Twitter population was the UK with 16.65 mil-
lion users, which is one-quarter of the population. But in Germany, 5.45 million
people were on Twitter, which is just 6.5% of the population (Statista 2021). In add-
ition, US-based research shows that ‘most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific
10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users’(Wojcik and Hughes 2019).
Hence, without adoption by traditional media, the political effects of social
media remain fairly limited. A good example is Donald Trump’s victory in the
2016 US presidential elections, which is often explained by his massive Twitter
presence. But social media did not win Trump the election. First of all, Trump
only had such a massive Twitter presence because of the fame he had
amassed through traditional media, most notably his TV show The Apprentice,
which aired on one of the three major networks in the US. And it was traditional
media, from CNN to the New York Times, which gave Trump excessive coverage –
estimated to have been worth almost US$ 6 billion (Sultan 2017). While it is
undoubtedly true that his Twitter presence helped increase his disproportionate
coverage, it was gatekeepers in the traditional media that decided to grant him
access and bring his message from his few million Twitter followers to the hundreds
of millions of traditional media consumers.
What can we do?
The question that I always get asked after a lecture on populism is, what can we do?
Unfortunately, I don’t know if I have the right answer to that question. But what is
very important to note is that populism is much more the symptom than the cause
of the current problems. It is a symptom of a malfunctioning liberal democracy.
Now, once it comes to power, it creates massive problems. Hungary shows that,
but even Hungary has bigger problems than just Fidesz. It wasn’t that Hungary
was doing fantastically well before Viktor Orbán returned to power. Orbán won
because Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany was caught on tape saying
that they had lied about everything to win the elections. So, clearly, Hungarian
democracy was not doing particularly well.
For me, the real question is not how we defeat populism, but how can we
strengthen liberal democracy? This is not the same question. If you merely defeat
populism, liberal democracy is still in trouble. However, if you strengthen liberal
democracy, by definition populism also gets weaker. But how do you strengthen lib-
eral democracy? Let’s first discuss two popular responses that do more harm than
good, anti-populism and technocracy (which sometimes are combined).
Anti-populism claims that ‘we’, the liberal democrats, are the pure ones and
‘they’, the populists, are the corrupt ones. It is the mirror image of populism,
which means that it is also monist and moralist, and therefore loathes compromise.
Anti-populism has been a popular response against populist governments like the
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SYRIZA government in Greece (Stavrakakis et al. 2018). And it has become even
more widespread within the disposed political mainstream after the populist double
whammy of Brexit and Trump in 2016. A particular painful example of anti-
populism was Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘deplorables’speech, in which she said,
‘You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters
into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?’(Reilly 2016). While I do not wish
to claim that anti-populism is as detrimental to liberal democracy as populism –
this remains an empirical question –it is important to note that it has some of
the same anti-liberal democratic assumptions about society and politics.
Another response to populism is technocracy –rule by experts (‘technocrats’).
As argued before, technocratic arguments have become increasingly powerful in
the neoliberal era, particularly within the EU (e.g. Mair 2013). While populism
and technocracy are diametrically opposed in some ways, notably the valuation
of ‘the people’, they share important positions, which are highly problematic for lib-
eral democracy. In essence, both are anti-political, pretending to have the (one)
answer to all problems. They also share a critique of ‘the party model of represen-
tative democracy’, which is foundational to European democracies (Caramani
2017). So, even if technocracy would be able to defeat populism, it will not save
liberal democracy. But given that it is technocracy (i.e. undemocratic liberalism)
that has created populism, as I argued above, it is probably not even able to
defeat it.
What we need is more rather than less politics. While it might sound odd, popu-
lism can only be defeated by repoliticizing politics. Not through a populist debate,
but through a liberal democratic debate. As Müller (2016) has so aptly stated,
‘talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists’. This does not
necessarily have to mean that we should create completely different policies. We
probably do not have to go back on European integration or even neoliberal
economics, which I am personally not a fan of, but perhaps a majority of the
population is. What it means is that, when politicians argue that we should have
more European integration, they explain why they believe that is the case. Sure,
point out the problems with the alternatives, but mostly emphasize and explain
the benefits of your own position.
It has become received wisdom that you cannot defeat populists with
mainstream politics. Within the (centre) left, it has become popular to argue that
right-wing populism can only be defeated by left-wing populism (e.g. Mouffe
2019). This is a remarkably defeatist position, particularly given that populists
still attract only a minority of the population in most European countries.
I do not believe that we need populism, leftist or centrist, to defeat right-wing popu-
lism. Nor do I believe that we cannot win the political debate with liberal demo-
cratic arguments. Politicians from Biden to Merkel show that, election after
election. And I am convinced that if the Remain camp had based its campaign
on emphasizing the positive aspects of EU membership, rather than on the
(alleged) dangers of leaving the EU, the UK would still be in the EU today.
Paradoxically, the populist Zeitgeist is happening as people are overwhelmingly
democratic and increasingly liberal (e.g. Kriesi 2020). In fact, Europeans are actually
behaving now as democratic theory has always said democratic citizens should
behave. They make their own decisions, rather than follow their husband, priest
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or union leader. Europeans are also much more liberal than they have ever been.
Sure, Islamophobia is a massive problem. But, let’s face it, if we had had a poll
on Islamophobia in the 1950s, the results would have been the same, if not even
worse. Yet, if you look at views on gender equality and homosexuality,
Europeans today are (much) more liberal than previous generations (e.g. Wike
et al. 2019; Wilson 2020). So, at least in that sense radical right-wing populism is
actually representing more the past than the future.
The main challenge of contemporary European politics is not populism, it is the
ideological vacuum at the heart of the political mainstream. Social democratic par-
ties have lost their way with the Third Way, which reduced them to a lesser form of
the centre right (e.g. Streeck 2016). But centre-right parties are experiencing a simi-
lar development at the moment, where they experience temporary success on the
basis of someone else’s ideology –that is, the populist radical right –while slowly
but steadily losing their ideological and support base (Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser
2021). It is high time that liberal democrats started to tell a convincing ideological
story again. That story should be Christian-democratic, social-democratic, green,
liberal, conservative. We need many different stories, reflecting and acknowledging
the many different groups and views our societies count. The different ideological
stories should emphasize the differences between them, but they should also expli-
citly acknowledge that the other parties are opponents with different but legitimate
views, and not enemies (Mouffe 2000). They should also emphasize that comprom-
ise is the essence of liberal democratic politics.
It is time to end the populist Zeitgeist. One of the most important steps to do
this is to stop using the term ‘the people’in a homogeneous way and claim that
one party or politician knows what is good for ‘the people’or represents ‘the peo-
ple’. We have to acknowledge that there is nothing that is good for all people, or at
least for all the people in the same way. Not even environmental protection. Sure, it
is great to implement policies so that we do not all die, but even these policies will
be much more expensive or intrusive for some people than for others –a lesson
that French President Emanuel Macron has learned the hard way with the populist
Yellow Vests protests. Only by emphasizing and legitimizing the different groups,
interests and values that exit in all societies can we rejuvenate liberal democracy.
Time to return to a pluralist Zeitgeist.
Epilogue: populism and COVID-19
The last years have been dominated by COVID-19, which has also led to a frenzy of
speculation on what the effects of the pandemic would be on populism.
Unsurprisingly, most assessments were heavily influenced by Trump, or another
specific national context, which led to regional and even global generalizations
on an N of 1. Several authors saw negative effects of the pandemic. Hans-Georg
Betz (2021) declared populism to be one of ‘Coronavirus-19s victims’, while
Valerio Alfonso Bruno and James Downes (2021) argued that ‘populist radical
right parties (PRR) have had their raison d’e
tre taken away from them and have
been left powerless politically, in the face of the pandemic’. In sharp contrast,
Paolo Gerbaudo (2020) argued that Europe is awaiting ‘something much worse
than the populist right of the 2010s: an extreme right using the whole arsenal of
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the red scare and rightwing authoritarianism to intimidate opponents and defend
its interests from demands for meaningful economic redistribution’.
Several studies have shown that most of the received wisdom about populism
and the pandemic has been wrong. In short, populists did not all deny or minimize
the pandemic, populists in government were overall not more or less (in)competent
than non-populist governments, and ‘populism’was neither killed nor strengthened
by COVID-19 (e.g. Meyer 2020; Wondreys and Mudde 2021). This should not have
come as a surprise, as populist actors are highly diverse, ranging from the radical
left to the radical right. Moreover, populist parties and politicians find themselves
in very varied political positions: one-party governments, part of a broader coali-
tion, and parliamentary or extra-parliamentary opposition. That said, it is true
that more and more populist parties and politicians have become sceptical of pre-
ventative measures, from face masks to lockdowns, in the second wave.
In a more theoretical sense, as a thin-centred ideology, populism does not have a
position on public health issues. It has been argued that populism is inherently
opposed to ‘experts’, but that is a simplification. In practice, populists have regularly
propagated and used experts (see Taggart 2000). What they oppose is a ‘govern-
ment by experts’, in which experts are above ‘the general will of the people’
(Müller 2020). As a political issue, the pandemic can be put in the general frame-
work of populism as an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.
Many European populists, particularly those in opposition, have presented them-
selves as the voice of ‘the people’against the ‘corrupt’,‘incompetent’and ‘undemo-
cratic’COVID-19 policies of the political and public health elite (Wondreys and
Mudde 2021).
Still, the pandemic does not seem to be a big winning issue for populists.
Although populist parties tend to be the only major parties to criticize the other
parties (government and opposition) for ignoring ‘the people’and for pushing
‘undemocratic’policies, the issue is not that easy to link to their core message.
As economies are hard-hit, left populists struggle to get support for higher taxes
and more redistribution, even if austerity policies are less popular today than dur-
ing the Great Recession. And populist radical right parties have been robbed of
their key nativist policy, the closing of borders, as almost all countries decided to
do this early on, with support from most main parties. If anything, this shows,
again, that populism is secondary to most populist parties, and mainly strengthens
the host ideology, be it nativism on the right or socialism on the left.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the editors of Government and Opposition, Laura Cram and
Erik Jones, for the original invitation to give the 2019 Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro
Lecture, which was a true and unexpected honour. I also want to thank the two reviewers for their con-
structive criticism, Jan Jagers and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser for their insights and support, without
which I would never have been able to develop most of the ideas presented in this article, and Jakub
Wondreys, for his invaluable research assistance. Finally, I want to thank the late Peter Mair, for believing
in me, and for pushing me far beyond my comfort zone and natural inhibitions. I could not have wished for
a better academic mentor. You and your work are sorely missed.
Notes
1This is not the place to revisit the ever-growing debate on the definition of populism, which continues to
dominate (too) much of the academic and public debate on the phenomenon. I have discussed this before
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(e.g. Mudde 2017) and there are various other publications that provide great overviews of the debate
(e.g. Moffitt 2020; Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017b).
2To be absolutely clear, I reject the notion that there is a ‘Muddean camp’or even a ‘Muddean frame’
(Maiguashca 2019). Unlike Laclau, I did not create a new approach, but rather clarified, and perhaps helped
popularize, the much older ideational approach, which can already be found in most foundational texts of
the comparative study of populism (see, for example, Canovan 1981; Gellner and Ionescu 1970).
3The distinction between ‘thin-centred’and ‘thick-centred’ideologies comes from Michael Freeden
(1998), although I would like to note that Freeden himself does not see populism as a ‘thin-centred ideol-
ogy’(Freeden 2017; see also Aslanidis 2016).
4The Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter famously defined democracy as a mere procedure:
‘The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes
the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to
assemble in order to carry out its will’(Schumpeter 1956: 269).
5The figure includes elections until 2017, but the overall score of populist parties has not changed
significantly in the last few years.
6While the exact start and end of the economic crisis of the Great Recession is difficult to pinpoint for
each country, but in line with assessments by economists (Uhlig 2010), I have dated the crisis from
early 2008 to mid-2009. Hence, the ‘Change crisis’column reports the total percentage of populist support
in the first national legislative election since 2010 minus that of the last elections before 2008.
7This increase was almost exclusively on the right, which is probably a consequence of the so-called
‘refugee crisis’, which has transformed European politics significantly (see Mudde 2019).
8The importance of nostalgia to populism has often been (casually) noted in public debates, but has so far
received little academic attention. A ground-breaking new study shows the importance of nostalgia for
different forms of populism in Turkey (Elçi 2021).
9While the professionalization and homogenization are Europe-wide trends, important national
differences in elite recruitment remain (see, for instance, Hartmann 2006).
10 Unfortunately, there is not much comparative research on far-right MPs, let alone on their socio-
demographic characteristics. One of the few comparative sources draws disproportionately from parties
of the first two waves of the post-war far right (Linz et al. 2007), so I build here mainly on my own
comparative observations as well as on some national studies (e.g. Wauters 2012).
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