Natasza Styczyńska presents a book about populism outside of Western Europe. This, per se, is already a very interesting premise because way too often we tend to conflate ‘European populism’ with just a few Western European countries, while this new volume describes the characteristics of populism in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Moreover, the volume offers a very interesting overview of the features that unite different populist manifestations across Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro as well as the differences between several types of populisms in these countries ..read more

In this interview we talk with Giorgos Katsambekis about the process of mainstreaming of authoritarianism. The topics approached in this conversation are extremely relevant given the current Zeitgeist. In these days Donald Trump is trying a comeback after the 2021 failed coup, in Italy 1000 fascists gathered in Rome to commemorate their dead camerati, with a great display of fascist salutes and Celtic crosses, while the French ‘moderate Right’ approved a controversial anti-immigration bill that the radical Right considers a victory. Katsambekis offers a lucid account of the processes that make ..read more

The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in power since one year, and she has been very busy opening an exhibition in Rome about J.R.R. Tolkien (one of her old obsessions, we talked about it in one of the last interviews, here). But this is far from the only thing she has been busy with during the last 12 months. She also devoted quite some time to official visits to former Italian colonies such as Libya, Albania, and Ethiopia, discussing issues linked to energy, migrants, and infrastructures. Last May, I went to King’s College (London) for the presentation of Marianna Griffini’s book ‘The ..read more

POP already treated extensively about the links between populism, the far right, and nostalgia. In the last year alone, we had a great talk with Francesca Melhuish, who analyzed British nostalgia and Brexit, as well as Ezgi Elçi, who studied Ottoman nostlagia in Turkey. In this interview, Luca Versteegen shows that nostalgia predicts support for radical right parties and is associated with more negative evaluations of the government. Enjoy the reading… 1) Let’s start from your decision to study the populist radical right. Is there any personal experience, reading, or piece of research that mad ..read more

In this double interview we finally talk about Italy with two Professors, Filippo Tronconi and Gianfranco Baldini, who are investigating Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. This is an important interview that makes up, at least in part, for POP’s lack of attention to Italy. Being an Italian myself, I have always preferred not to deal with Italy because Italian politics (as interesting as it is) is also neurotic, unbearable, and at times incommentable. The time to open this wound and look into it has finally come. Tronconi and Baldini explain the electoral success of Brothers of Italy, a relati ..read more

In conversation with Yanina Welp, we discuss some of the topics present in her last book: The will of the people. Populism and citizens participation in Latin America. Latin America is a region where populism is prolific and often appears with characteristics that are different compared to European populism. POP already devoted several interviews and articles about populism in Latin America and in comparison with Europe, with a focus on the Andes region and Brazil among other things, and if you are interested in Latin American populism you can find much more content in The Populism Interviews ..read more

The label of ‘populist’ is not useful to understand why Bolsonaro, a far-right politician, is a danger for Brazilian democracy. In this article, João Feres Júnior explains why this is the case. Feres Júnior has been working on Bolsonaro for years, and you can find some of his most recent work here and here. In a previous article for POP, Eduardo Tamaki convincingly claimed that Bolsonaro is indeed a populist: though in apparent contradiction, the points of contact between the two approaches are numerous and that’s why it is interesting to read both articles in parallel to form a complete opini ..read more

In this article Kun He talks about Chinese-style populism. This is an interesting and important article not only because it focuses on a rather neglected case when it comes ot populism (populism in non-democratic settings is a unicorn in this field), but also because it makes it possible expand our understanding of populism to include a non-Western perspective. What happens to populism when we stop thinking about it in the context of democratic countries? Well, in the Chinese case, first we have to distinguish between communist populism and online bottom-up populism. Then, we must consider tha ..read more

In this interview, Ezgi Elçi talks about the populist use of the past. Collective nostalgia is about yearning for a time before a fall or a decline in society: populists often instrumentalize this feeling to generate an opposition between the pure people versus immoral elites. Unexpectedly, though, the nostalgia of populists is more about the future than the past. The elites allegedly betrayed the country in the past, but what really matters is to build a new society which, clearly, needs new (populist) elites. We then move to discuss the case of Turkey, and how Erdogan’s party (AKP) exploits ..read more

When I go to the office, I usually take the bike lane along Avenida da República, one of the principal arteries of Lisbon. All political parties rely on the traffic to force the countless drivers to stare at their billboards as they wait for the green light. Whenever I pass, I get a free class on Portuguese politics. When I arrived in Lisbon in 2019, I started working on a project that tried to answer the following question: why is there no populism in Portugal? By now it is clear that populism is a common feature of Portuguese politics, the question would be perceived as naive at best. Anothe ..read more