Populism

This article investigates the curious non-emergence of populism in contemporary Cyprus despite the deep financial crisis and profound political disillusionment-conditions that are treated as necessary and sufficient. Putting emphasis on Cyprus' key historical particularities, the article inquires into the ways Cyprus' political past, and the subsequent salient 'national question', produce ambiguous notions of 'the people' on the one hand, and impede the potentials for a 'populist moment' on the other hand. By assessing the performative dynamics of oppositional parties in Cyprus, the empirical analysis suggests that the absence of populism is rooted in the following factors: First, nationalist discourse prevails over, and significantly weakens, populist discourse. Second, self-proclaimed challenger parties served 'old wine in new bottles' further undermining their position and claims. The failure of populism to take root in Cyprus, brings to the fore important theoretical insights relevant to the non-emergence of populism even under favourable conditions.

Shifting attention away from doctrinal debates on Islam toward the political realities of Muslim majority countries, this study investigates the promises and limitations of populism in the Islamic world. Using examples from Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia, it aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of political Islam, and to shed light on populist forms of politics beyond Western democracies. Central to this ambition is the exploration of whether this recent tide of Islamic populism acts as a corrective that empowers the people, or as a threat that capitalizes on the ill-informed masses to garner support for charismatic leaders. The cases under scrutiny demonstrate that by weakening the authoritarian structures, producing doctrinally flexible politicians, and incorporating marginalized groups into politics, this new form of populism facilitates democratic transitions in authoritarian and competitive-authoritarian settings. However, the very characteristics of populism that prove successful against the establishment also create significant impediments for democratic consolidation later on. By rejecting plurality and failing to re-establish the formal and informal institutions necessary for democratic governance, these movements often replace one form of authoritarianism with another. Broken promises of inclusion leave a bitter legacy of populism in the political arena, making citizens much more cynical about political processes in the long run.

ÖZET Popülizm çalışmalarında terimin ontoloji konusundaki fikir ayrılığı da vaka çalışmaları kadar yer tutmaktadır. Bu çalışma fark ve anlaşmazlıklara rağmen 'saf halk' ve 'seçkin' ikiliği ve çatışmasının popülizmi betimleyen özellik olduğunu eleştirel bir tarama ile savunmaktadır. Analitik bir araç olarak popülizmin izini sürerken bu ikiliğin varlığının asgari ölçüt olabileceği ve dış politika yapımına etkisinin hangi sorular çerçevesinde çalışılabileceği tartışılmıştır. Kimlik çalışmalarının temel referans noktası 'biz' ve 'onlar' kavramlarının yeni biçimi olarak popülizm, kendi halkını inşa eder. Bu anlamda ilk adım olarak liderin popülist olduğu tesis edilmeli, devamla dış politikasının farklılık ve değişim sergileyip sergilemediği incelenebilir. Güney Asya'da hali hazırda yönetimde olan popülist liderlerin dış politikalarında, yine kimlik çalışmalarını bakışıyla Çin 'önemli öteki' olarak merkezi bir yerdedir. Çelişkili gibi görülebilecek ilişkiler kapanmanın imkansızlığı ile açıklanabilir.
Anahtar Kelimeler Popülizm, Dış Politika, Söylemsel Yaklaşım, Çin.

La idea de populismo se caracteriza por una polisemia radical que en no pocas ocasiones debilita su capacidad explicativa. La presente voz tiene el objetivo de exponer un doble movimiento para ganar en su comprensión: por un lado, reconstruir la historia, semántica y tipología del concepto, por otro, exponer las líneas generales de la teoría política del filósofo del populismo Ernesto Laclau. Finalmente, sugerimos que el sentido de los populismos está asociado al «nuevo espíritu del capitalismo postmoderno» como una de las formas de expresión del malestar social contemporáneo y que su encarnación política puede dirigirse tanto en una dirección emancipatoria como de «revolución pasiva».

Breeze examines the way in which populist discourses develop in the official self-presentations of the four main political parties in Scotland before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum. Her analysis focuses on categories related to place, identity and belonging, showing how layers of ideological difference are materialised in political discourse. The positioning of the Scottish Nationalist Party is consistently Scottish in terms of discursive stance and deictic centre, while other parties have difficulties negotiating the overlap of UK and Scottish identity. Populist traits in SNP discourses include the identification of an external antagonist, and the configuration of discursive dichotomies firmly placing 'the people of Scotland' in a 'we' versus 'them' relationship with a number of discursive 'others.'

Contemporary France is a prolific arena for post-fascist actors, parties, and movements. Self-proclaimed alternative news outlets and publishing houses serve as forums for information and mobilisation, through various strategies, to resist an alleged onslaught by the enemies of the nation and its people: multiculturalism, feminism, political correctness, political corruption, and civilisational decay. In this article, I explore uncivility as a discur-sive logic within the French post-fascist media-ecology, focusing on the conspicuous use of irony and discursive displacement. More specifically, I discuss how sardonic irony as an uncivil discursive strategy is employed to navigate the legal boundaries of free speech and how discursive displacement, coupled with irony, is used as an affective identificatory technique in post-fascist discourse.

Turkey has seen a surge in populist nationalism over the last decade. How this has played out in transnational space through overseas Turkish citizens’ voting behaviour remains understudied, however. This article takes up this question, focusing on how the populist–nationalist appeals of the ruling AKP have been received by Turkish citizens in Europe. Specifically, it asks why such appeals have resonated highly with voters in some host countries but not in others. The study suggests that expatriates from Turkey facing more discrimination are more likely to be wooed by populist–nationalist discourse from the homeland. The findings draw on official statements and speeches, Turkish electoral data, the European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey, newspaper articles, and secondary sources.

In recent history, Italy has repeatedly emerged as a successful laboratory for political experiments. After WWI, Fascism was invented there by Mussolini, and it quickly spread across Europe. In the 1990s, Berlusconi anticipated Trump's entrepreneurial populism. Today, there is a risk that Italy will once again perform the role of a political avant-garde: that it will export to Europe a sovereign populism of a new kind that is nonetheless in continuity with disquieting features of the worst past. The essay performs a close reading of the programmatic speech that Minister of Home Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Salvini delivered in July 2018 at the thirty-second annual gathering of the Lega party. Its aim is to detect the presence in it of the politics of abjection (Judith Butler), a “Fascist archetype” (Umberto Eco) that affects both racialized and non-heterosexual people.

The 2020 ‘mosque-ing’ of Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) shook a cornerstone of the Turkish Republican tradition. I lay out the immediate political context, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the content of five court decisions that built up to the mosque-ing, and what these show about the current state of secularism, democracy and institutions in Turkey. I argue that the Ayasofya episode is a case of polarization to the point of abeyance and waqf-izing the Turkish state. Evaluating the episode in light of the past decade of Turkish politics, I propose that it is the present stage of a trajectory from the politics of modernity to the anti-politics of abeyance, and that the midpoint of this trajectory is the politics of ‘multiple modernities’. It is time to lay to rest the wave of conservative epistemologies emerging from Shmuel Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple modernities’.

The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the EU, in January 2014, encountered much resistance both in European political discourse and the media, as these migrants became demonised and presented as social and economic threats. In this article, we show how the Romanian press dealt with such discriminatory discourses against the Romanian migrants. We conduct a thorough Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of news items published in Romanian press, prior to the lifting of work restrictions, and we argue that the Roma emerged as the perfect scapegoats that could explain the deviant and unruly behaviours ascribed by some western media to ‘Romanians’. We also show how racism toward the Roma, referred here as Romaphobia, invokes non-racial practices and instead builds on a reverse victimhood narrative. Such discourses relate in a broader sense to well-established discursive practices in Romanian context but also to the political climate across Europe which is marked by increased intolerance toward the Roma. It is the mixture of stereotypical discourses and populist rhetoric that makes racism towards the Roma appear naturalised and increasingly more difficult to challenge.

Is technological innovation spinning out of control? During a one-week period in 2018, social media was revealed to have had huge undue influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the first fatality from a self-driving car was recorded. What’s paradoxical about the understandable fear of machines taking control through software, robots, and artificial intelligence is that new technology is often introduced in order to increase our control of a certain task. This is what Ezio Di Nucci calls the “control paradox.” Di Nucci also brings this notion to bear on politics: we delegate power and control to political representatives in order to improve democratic governance. However, recent populist uprisings have shown that voters feel disempowered and neglected by this system. This lack of direct control within representative democracies could be a motivating factor for populism, and Di Nucci argues that a better understanding of delegation is a possible solution.

Poco nos dice tanto sobre una persona como su actitud frente al desacuerdo. Hay quienes los evitan a toda costa: les inquieta generar reyertas con quienes no conocen y, sobre todo, con quienes aprecian. Hay quienes no pueden concebir que, si se les ha prestado la atención debida a sus argumentos, pueda persistir el disenso: o piensan que no se les escuchó con justicia o que sus interlocutoras no están a su altura. Hay también quienes lo afrontan con actitud de estudiantes atentas y se limitan a prestar curiosidad y escucha: aunque resulta infrecuente que los intercambios comunicativos en los que participan se transformen en agrias querellas, su silencio resulta del todo improductivo. Así, hay personas que sólo abordan frivolidades, pero también las hay arrogantes y falsamente modestas. En el primer caso, estas personas no siempre pueden evitar los desacuerdos (aunque muchas veces sin duda es lo aconsejable); en los dos últimos, se presentan extremos viciosos cuyo término medio virtuoso es la humildad. Pocas personas han exhibido públicamente la virtud de la humildad intelectual como el creador del ensayo moderno: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Sus ensayos, piezas intelectuales y literarias de calidad inigualable, son, no obstante, de difícil acercamiento y evaluación.

PM Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often seen as one of the paradigmatic cases of illiberalism and an intense contestation of immigration. This paper argues that the Hungarian government’s strong focus on immigration and its hardline positions on the issue proved to be a political jackpot for the governing party. Besides presenting the claims and frames Fidesz has used regarding migration since 2015, three analytical aspects are covered in this article, based on Eurobarometer, European Social Survey and Hungarian domestic polling data. First, the trends in the perception of the importance of migration for the Hungarian voters are compared to the European public opinion. Second, the changes in the attitudes of Hungarians to immigration are also analysed in European comparison. Third, I also present what role the fears related to immigration played at the 2018 parliamentary elections. On the whole, the Hungarian centre-right successfully politicised the issue of migration, and acted as an agenda-setter rather than a follower. It was able to sustain a sense of crisis between 2015 and 2018; it exacerbated the rejection of immigration in society; and it was successful in entrenching migration as one of the top fears among its potential voters.

BUDAPEST/BRÜSSEL-Viktor Orbáns Fidesz hat-endlich-die EVP verlassen: eine lange erwartete Entscheidung, die für Orbán selbst zwar große Gefahren birgt, da er nunmehr auch die letzte Rückendeckung seitens der europäischen Christdemokratie verlieren wird, die aber für die Neuformierung der europäischen Konservativen eine große Chance darstellen könnte. Aktuell bestehen drei Optionen, um seiner Partei ein neues Fraktionszuhause innerhalb des Europäischen Parlaments zu bieten: Die Fidesz schließt sich der ID (Identität und Demokratie) an, sie schließt sich der EKR (Europäische Konservative und Reformer) an, oder es kommt zu einer generellen Umstrukturierung, ja vielleicht gar Fusion dieser beiden Fraktionen. Alle Optionen besitzen Vor-und Nachteile, und man darf gespannt sein, welche Entscheidung gefällt werden wird-und wann.