And if the populism of the 21ste century had begun its decline? This is the thesis proposed by a stimulating essay just published, under the signature of Thibault Muzergues, with the same title as the present column (PostpopulismÉditions de l’Observatoire, 2024).
The author underlines, as in this column in January, that Italy is a pioneering country, a laboratory which often carries within itself – since the fascism of a century ago, and even for 2000 years – tendencies dedicated to ‘universalize.
As Berlusconi in 1994 had prefigured Trump twenty years in advance, Giorgia Meloni, nationalist in power in Rome since October 2022, would, according to Muzergues, be carrying out a fundamental “paradigm change”, which is beginning to spread elsewhere.
The paradigm of “the people against the elites”, of “all rotten”, of the “white hat, white hat”, of the raging anger which inspired – with national nuances – the votes in favor of Trump, of Brexit, of Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the Syriza party in Greece… this paradigm could have had its day in 2024.
Populism and “revolt of the people”: this was the great divide, the message of the 2010s. With “populist victories” (“Yes” to Brexit in 2016; fleeting power of Matteo Salvini in Italy at the same time).
In that decade, Muzergues emphasizes, the wave expressed legitimate concerns and left traces. Shaking up the “elites” in a salutary way, she sent messages.
But most often, the tail of this wave is pitiful, with the spectacle of incompetence or powerlessness in power: Salvini in Italy, Syriza in Greece, marginalized; the flamboyant failure of Brexit and the bitter regret of many of those who voted for it.
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According to Muzergues, “the great disruption of the 2010s […] is now finished. We are moving on to something else. In Italy, we are witnessing the end of the divide between populists and elites, which still exists in France. We will be back […] to a classic right-left divide, but rights and lefts defining themselves in a much clearer way.
Concretely, how does this change translate into the Meloni program? The nationalist and conservative right that it represents has stopped railing against Europe every morning as the source of all evil (long a necessary populist refrain); she accepts subsidies from Brussels and the idea of a European Union.
Faced with Russia invading Ukraine, she quickly understood that a pro-Putin posture was untenable – while Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini ate out of the hand of the Kremlin and have since only partially mended their ways.
Elsewhere in Europe, Geert Wilders (“winner” in November of the elections, with 23% of the votes… and 14 other parties in Parliament!) has given up on forming a government himself, given his relative isolation. In Poland, the previous month, the PiS populists lost the elections.
In many cases, the author emphasizes that the postpopulist metamorphosis is internal to training. In the manner of Fratelli d’Italia of Meloni, many parties which called for “the revolt of the people against the elites” changed their discourse: Jimmie Åkesson’s Sweden Democrats, Syriza in Greece, “True Finns” in Helsinki…
Muzergues insists that populism, a style and attitude before being an ideology, has been found more often on the right, but that there are examples of it on the left. He also writes that a party like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally borrows from the statist left for its economic program. (Something disputed, by the way, the magazine Marianne in its March 7 edition, with the headline “RN. The social imposture.” According to Mariannethe RN would also be on the right in economics.)
Final question: with this example from a prophetic Italy… what are France and the United States waiting for to move, in turn, to post-populism?
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