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A Global Tsunami
of Populism?

By Jan-Werner Mueller

Our era is witnessing an inflationary use of the term “populism”:
all kinds of political actors, on the right, but also on the left, arelabelled as populists. Even Emmanuel Macron at one point was
accused of being a populist; it was said that he represented apopulist of the “extreme center”. Moreover, a particular image has
been dominating media and scholarly commentary, one that
allegedly holds the key to understanding the underlying political
dynamics of our times: that of a seemingly unstoppable “wave” ofpopulism, or, as Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party (in whoseeyes the metaphor of the wave apparently didn’t do justice to his
own world-historical role) put it at one point: a “tsunami of
populism” which, to stay faithful to the image, would now wash away
elites and establishments everywhere.
Yet the image of the wave is profoundly misleading, and partly sobecause it is based on an over-inclusive notion of what is to count as
a populist party (so that newcomers and political “insurgents” areautomatically included among populists). Conventional wisdom has
it that all those who, as the phrase goes, “criticize elites” or are“angry at the establishment” should be considered populists. This
seems obvious; but it is actually a very peculiar thought. Up until
recently any civics education teacher would have told us that keeping
a close eye on the powerful is actually a sign of good democratic
engagement on the part of citizens. And yet, during the second
decade of the 21st century, we are constantly told that anyone who is
critical of elites is somehow a populist who might pose a danger todemocracy. Clearly, things cannot be as simple as that.

What is Populism?
It is true that, when they are in opposition, populists criticize
sitting governments (and also other parties) – in that sense, they areindeed “anti-establishment”. But they also do something else, andthat is crucial. In one way or another they claim that they, and only
they, represent what populists tend to call “the real people” or also“the silent majority”. This claim to a monopoly of truly representing
the people might not sound so bad – it seems not immediately thesame as racism or, let’s say, a fanatical hatred of European
integration. And yet it always has two consequences which areindeed damaging for democracy: first, and rather obviously, there is
the fact that populists hold that all other contenders for power are
fundamentally illegitimate. Their stance here is never just about adisagreement in matters of policy, or even values – which, after all, is
58 Japan SPOTLIGHT • September / October 2019

Photo: KD Busch

AuthorJan-Werner Mueller

completely normal in a democracy and ideally even productive (let’s
not forget that democracy is not about consensus, but about
constitutionally contained conflict – if we somehow magically always
agreed about everything, we would not need democracy as a meansof dealing with disagreements in a civil manner). Rather, populists
charge that all others are essentially bad characters, corrupt and“crooked”, and fail to implement what they often refer to as “the willof the people”. The kinds of things that Donald J. Trump said abut
his opponent in the 2015-2016 presidential race (“Crooked Hillary”,“Lock her up!”) were in many ways extreme. But they were not truly
an exception: what Trump said, is what all populists tend to say in
one form or another.
Second, and less obviously, populists also suggest that all thosecitizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly“real people” (and who therefore also tend not to support populists
politically) might not properly belong to the people at all. Two
illustrations of this perhaps less self-evident point: at the end of amomentous night for Brexit, Nigel Farage stated that the outcome
should be understood as a “victory for real people” – implying, ofcourse, that the 48% of British voters who wanted to stay inside theEuropean Union are not quite “real” – or, rather, do not truly belong
to the British people. Or consider a largely ignored claim by Trump
during the presidential campaign: the candidate Trump announced
that “The only important thing is the unification of the people –because the other people don’t mean anything.”
Populists incessantly talk about the unification or unity of thepeople – but it is always unification on their terms, and whoever
does not want to be unified according to their notion of the people
gets excluded in one form or another. The crucial point to grasp
about populism, then, is that it is not just about “anti-elitism”.
Anyone can criticize the powerful; obviously, it does not mean thatthey are right, but one cannot immediately condemn them assomehow dangerous for democracy. In fact, the opposite might be
the case. What is crucial – and so pernicious – about populism is thetendency always to exclude others in a highly moralistic manner:obviously at the level of party politics, where all others aredenounced as bad, corrupt characters; less obviously, at the level ofthe people themselves, where those who disagree with the populists(or, often, already vulnerable minorities) are put outside theboundaries of the real people. In short: not anti-elitism is the issue,
but anti-pluralism.
This is another way of saying that populists tend to reduce politicalhttps://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

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Article 2questions to questions of belonging. Trump does not try to refute hispolitical opponents on policy grounds, but simply calls them“un-American”. Reccep Tayyip Erdoğan at one point addressed
critics in the country with the statement: “We are the people. Who
are you?” (of course, he knew that they were Turks, too). And
Poland’s de facto ruler, Jarosław Kaczyński, charged demonstratorswith being Poles of the worst sort who had treason in their genes.
Populism, then, is not primarily a question of policy content: wehave plenty of other concepts to capture phenomena which arenowadays routinely (and unthinkingly) subsumed under the label“populism”: think of nativism in order to describe a number of
attitudes to immigration, or protectionism as the appropriate term
for certain types of opposition to aspects of globalization. Notice,also, that there can be right-wing and left-wing forms of populism;
for the latter, the rule of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás
Maduro is the most obvious example. At the same time, calling newleft-wing parties in Europe populist simply because they are criticalof the status quo, or hold that Social Democrats have been too
accommodating of neoliberal policies, is hardly justified. One does
not have to like the ideas of, for instance, Spain’s Podemos party, but
the latter does not belong in the same category as Trump or Farage.

How Do Populists Rule?
It is often said that, virtually by definition, populists cannot
actually govern. If one holds that their main characteristic is that they
criticize elites, one is inclined to think that, once in power, they
themselves have become “the elite” and hence have to abandon theiranti-elitist stance, which is to say: stop being populists. On anotherwidespread view the core aspect of populism is that its
representatives all have horrendously simplistic ideas about policy(essentially the argument, famously also put forward by the Germansocial theorist Ralf Dahrendorf, that populists do simplicity, whereas
real democrats deal with complexity). According to this perspective,the demagogic promises made to the gullible people will not be kept
once populists are in office; the latter will have to moderate andbecome responsible policy-makers (or, if they don’t, their failure will
be obvious to their voters: no walls get actually built, no trade
agreements are successfully renegotiated, and so on). Notice how allthese scenarios imply the same outcome: the problem solves itself,
either because populists cease being populist or their parties will
necessarily crash and burn.
Alas, all these assumptions are not only complacent – they are
profoundly mistaken. We have enough examples in our time – from
Hungary to Turkey to Venezuela and India – to recognize that
populists can indeed govern, and, more important still, that they cangovern specifically as populists, which is to say as actors who do not
truly recognize the legitimacy of an opposition. It is therefore also no

accident that they denounce any criticism – be it from opposition
parties or from within unelected institutions, such as the judiciary or
free media – as automatically corrupt and treasonous.
Less obviously, we can recognize distinct elements of what by now
we may well call a distinct populist art of governance. The populist
art of governance is based on nationalism (often with racist
overtones), on hijacking the state for partisan loyalists and, lessobviously, on weaponizing the economy to secure political power: a
combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism. This
specificity tends to be missed by political diagnoses that equate
contemporary right-wing populism with fascism, or see populism as
a new, internationally successful ideology, or assume that “ordinary
people” brought all this on themselves with their craving for
authoritarianism.
Populists – if they have sufficiently large majorities andcountervailing powers prove too weak – will try to appropriate thestate apparatus itself. Which is to say: they try to replace what atleast in theory should be a neutral bureaucracy with partisan
loyalists. One might object that plenty of parties attempt to
instrumentalize the civil service and clearly not all of them aremeaningfully described as populist. True, but the difference is that
populists can hijack the state quite openly, with an argument that is
unique to them. Remember their core claim that only they truly
represent the people; of course, the state exists to serve the people,
so if they take possession of the state, it is effectively the people
themselves who are appropriating what is rightfully theirs.
Of course, this appropriation does not only have a symbolic
dimension; it is also about power. It has been crucial for many
populist regimes to control, for instance, the office of publicprosecutor, or also to staff public media with loyalists and thereby
radically reduce media pluralism.
Another crucial aspect of populist rule is mass clientelism,
alongside a specific form of using the economy as a political tool.
Again, one might object that plenty of parties engage in clientelism,
which is to say bestow benefits or bureaucratic favors on politicalsupporters. Once again, the difference here has something to do withthe core claim of populists: only some citizens are the real people. To
ensure that only the real people enjoy proper governance is nothing
to hide or be ashamed of; rather, from the populists’ point of view,
this is how things ought to be. And, again, the symbolic dimensionof rewarding the deserving real people also has a realpolitik reason:
figures like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have built up theirown middle class (conforming to their image of the real people:
nationalist, Christian, adhering to a traditional conception of thefamily), and they have found reliable electoral support among thosestrata.
There is a further dynamic to do with the economy that deserves
our attention: in general, authoritarianism tends to go hand in hand
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Article 2with kleptocracy (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist
Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). There is one straightforward
explanation for this: the absence of legal and political constraints
makes self-dealing so much easier, which in turn reinforces the needto maintain a tight grip on the judiciary and the political system inorder to avoid punishment in the future. But there is also a political
logic: involving others in criminality compels their loyalty to theregime.
These dynamics – going beyond traditional kleptocracy – are what
the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has in mind when he refers
to the rise of a “mafia state” in his native country. A mafia state does
not have to involve large envelopes with cash changing hands under
the table; rather, it is the use of state structures and on the surface
legal means – in particular public procurement, where, strangely only
one bidder shows up. A mafia state is controlled by and benefits
what Magyar calls extended “political families” Absolute loyalty isgiven in exchange for material reward and, equally important,protection for an indefinite future. “The main benefit of controlling amodern bureaucratic state,” a Hungarian observer has noted, “is not
the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect theguilty.”Here ideology can also function as a reliable indicator of politicaland familial submission; going along with provocations andoutrageous norm-breaking by the leader becomes a litmus test for
those who might otherwise be suspected of having retained a belief
in proper democratic standards. What is more, since violating norms
compromises members of the political family, they must stick
together for mutual protection, which helps establish reliability andtrust – a defining feature of the original form of the mafia.
The new authoritarian-populist states are not fascist in the familiar
historical sense; in one important aspect, they actually turn thepattern of Nazi rule upside-down. As the political scientist and exile
Ernst Fraenkel demonstrated, the Nazi polity was not characterizedby complete lawlessness and chaos, as traditional accounts oftyranny or of totalitarianism tend to suggest; there were plenty ofareas of life that proceeded in normal, predictable ways: marriages
were concluded and annulled, business contracts written andenforced. Alongside these areas of relative legal normality, however,there was always the threat of the “prerogative state”, which could
act in completely unpredictable, unaccountable ways. Fraenkel
coined the term “dual state” to describe this split between normal,
predictable life and a sphere of unpredictable repression.
What if today we are once more faced with dual states – with thedifference that the realm of politics in many respects remains
relatively normal but for some legal-looking manipulations, while theeconomy is where one is subject to the arbitrary exercise of power?
Or perhaps not so arbitrary – for if it is correct that loyalty to thepolitical family is crucial for economic success, punishments are in
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fact foreseeable. Instead of sending muscle to collect the cash, thegovernment simply alerts the tax authorities – and they can always
find something. As a consequence, powerful businesspeople notobviously loyal to the regime are made offers to sell their holdings
which they cannot refuse – this has regularly happened to oligarchs
in Hungary who were perceived as aligned with the socialist party. As
the sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele has pointed out, these patterns
are not always easily discernible to outsiders, for actions that are
essentially political can always be represented as having been
dictated by economic necessity.
One last aspect of the populist art of governance needs to behighlighted: when there is protest, it becomes morally andsymbolically supremely important for such regimes to delegitimate
dissent as systematically as possible – even if the protest poses noreal danger to the ruling party. The most prominent strategy is toclaim that what appears, for instance, as a civil society
demonstration is ultimately no such thing: everything, populist
governments will allege, has been manipulated and paid for bysomeone on the outside. One can then trot out some usual suspects,
be it George Soros or the CIA (though for the truly creative
conspiracy theorist there are no limits: the Gezi Park protests, anErdoğan adviser eventually revealed, were the doing of Lufthansa,
which allegedly feared increased competition from Turkish Airlines
after the opening of Istanbul’s new airport). But the basic logic isalways the same: since populists claim that only they really represent
the people, it can, by definition, not be the case that real people areprotesting against them on the streets; in a sense, they must be
proven to be “fake citizens” in the pay of a hostile outside power(this also shows that, even when they are in government, populists
do not have to cease their anti-elitist discourse: there is always yet
another “shadowy international elite” which is preventing the
populists from implementing the people’s authentic will).
At the same time, populists might positively come to like protest: it
is fuel on the fire in the culture wars on which they thrive. This iswhy, in the first year of the Trump administration, Steve Bannon
described the “resistance” as “our friend”. The lesson here is not, ofcourse, that citizens should refrain from taking to the streets toprotest, only that we ought to be aware of how swift andsophisticated populists can be in turning dissent to their own
advantage, to justify what always ends up in a form of exclusionary
identity politics.

Why Populism?
One of the great ironies of our times is this: as mentioned
previously, a certain conventional wisdom identifies populism withthe tendency to give simplistic answers to complex questions. Yet
many who hold this view also would seem to be happy if anyone

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could explain to them in a sentence or so (or 140 characters or so)
the global “macro-cause” of populism, along the lines of: it’s all
because of globalization, or it’s all due to “cultural anxiety” (often acodeword for racism).
But there is no simple global explanation. As pedantic as it willsound, it is imperative to study different national contexts closely
and identify carefully which factors might have facilitated the rise
specifically of populist parties. Obviously, there needs to besomething going on that makes the claim that a homogeneous
corrupt elite should be blamed for one’s woes empirically not totally
ludicrous (and there need to be woes in the first place). And it clearly
can help populists if a country already features something like aculture war, so that conflicts can be understood in response to thequestion: “who truly belongs?” But statements along the lines “thefinancial crisis directly caused populism” or “populism’s successdemonstrates that majorities reject immigration” are not justsimplistic; they are false and, in the case of the latter, also havepernicious consequences.
Politicians and journalists often switch from one extreme ofregrading populists – namely assuming that they are all demagogues
whose utterances can automatically be discounted – to another,which is conceding that populists ultimately articulate people’s “realconcerns”. Giving the populists a monopoly on telling us what reallyworries citizens betrays a deep misunderstanding of how democratic
representation works. It is not about a mechanical reproduction of
objectively given interests and identities; rather, the latter are
dynamically formed in the process of politicians (as well as civilsociety, friends, neighbors, etc.) making political offers ofrepresentation and citizens responding. It’s not that everything that
populists say is necessarily fictitious – but it is a mistake to thinkthat only they know what is truly happening in society. Trump, forinstance, undoubtedly succeeded in making some Americans seethemselves as part of something like a white identity movement. But
citizens’ self-perceptions could also change again.
It would be a mistake to assume that all voters for populist parties
are themselves necessarily populists, which is to say that they share
the anti-pluralist views of populist leaders. And it would be a mistaketo think that populists reveal to us the ultimate objective truth aboutsociety. Yet many non-populist actors make precisely thesemistakes. Think about the infamous phrase “deplorables” or think
about how some socialists and Social Democrats in Europe thesedays seem essentially to be saying to themselves: “The working
class simply doesn’t like foreigners, as the success of right-wing
populists demonstrates. Nothing we can do about it.”As said at the outset of this essay, the image has always been
deeply misleading. After all, Farage did not bring about Brexit all byhimself. He needed the help of other established conservative
politicians such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Trump did not

become president as the candidate of a grassroots protest
movement of an angry white working class; rather, he represented avery established party and needed the blessing of Republican
heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. What
happened on Nov. 8, 2016 was not a free-standing triumph for
populism, but a confirmation of how partisan US politics has
become: 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; theyclearly could not fathom voting for a Democrat, even if many
Republicans in surveys registered deep doubts about Trump. In
short: to this day, no right-wing populist has come to power inWestern Europe or North American without the collaboration of
established conservative elites.
As the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has argued, theconsolidation of democracies in Europe depended crucially on the
behavior of conservative elites. During the interwar period, they
opted for working with authoritarian and even fascist parties – inmany places democracy died as a consequence. After the war, theychose to stick to the rules of the democratic game even if coreconservative interests were not faring well. We do not live inanything comparable to the interwar period and today’s populists are
not fascists – but the lesson still holds that the destiny of democracy
is as much a matter of the choices of established elites as insurgent
outsiders. As Larry Bartels has pointed out, it is also empiricallyhighly dubious even to assume an increase (let alone a “tsunami”) of
right-wing populist sentiment; what can be shown, though, is thatboth political entrepreneurs and more established actors havedecided either to defuse or mobilize and exploit such sentiments
over time. We must hold elites who collaborate with populists or
copy their ideas or effectively condone their conduct and shield themfrom criticism accountable.
Rejecting the image of the irresistible populist wave does notmean that we should conclude that anxieties about democracy arenecessarily exaggerated. We should be cautious, however, not toallow certain anxieties – especially when they become linked to“ordinary people” and their allegedly unquenchable desire forpopulism – to frame our political challenges the wrong way. One
important research question would be just why and how exactly
some conservatives have changed their stance. Presumably
conservatives today are no more opportunistic, or less morally
inhibited, than conservatives were 20 or evn 50 years ago. Or are
they?

Jan-Werner Mueller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. His
books include What is Populism? and Constitutional Patriotism; both have beentranslated into Japanese.

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