Is anti-populism the new populism?

When Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in the runoff round of the French presidential election on 7th May this year, I, like many Europeans, and most pro-Europeans, breathed a deep sigh of relief. Le Pen’s election would have been a total disaster for the European project and for the at least declared values of France as a democratic and egalitarian republic where neither racism nor isolationism find credence. Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macron’s platform itself shares one key feature with all of his main opponents, be it Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Melenchon, or Francois Fillon: Emmanuel Macron’s platform is little more than populism. More than that: politicians who claim to be anti-populist, while using effectively populist rhetoric, have become surprisingly widespread in our day and age. This article will briefly attempt to look at their rise in global politics today.
Naturally, Macron’s platform was miles ahead of many of his aforementioned opponents in terms of what I like in policy. It had neither the free market fundamentalism of Francois Fillon, nor the Eurosceptic economic nationalism of Jean-Luc Melenchon, nor the unabashed racism and authoritarianism of the Front National. This however does not mean he was anything other than at best a lesser evil. And it also does not mean he was not and is not a populist.
The platform on which he was elected promises few concrete ideas. He quite openly proclaimed himself to be “neither left nor right”, a statement vacuous and unclear in itself. He has vowed to “clean up politics”, at the time claiming so in a reference to his opponent Francois Fillon’s nepotism scandal — but the line itself sounding like something right out of a populist demagogue’s manual, evoking the same political emotion as Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” soundbite in his own presidential campaign, an image of a strongman leader driving away corrupt self-serving establishment politicians with one fell sweep.
We have to, in this light, consider the possibility that the rebirth of populism as a political force was not halted by Macron in France and by the defeat of the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands. Rather, it has influenced the very way we do politics, forced even our supposed anti-populists to adopt populist rhetoric and populist ways of thinking in order to win.
This tendency is neither new nor confined to France. Take, for example, former Italian PM Matteo Renzi’s 2016 constitutional referendum on proposals to centralise power within Italy by weakening the Italian parliamentary upper house, or Senate. Despite the referendum’s failure itself being depicted by far-right populist forces as a victory for them and against the EU, Renzi himself behaved in a manner that cannot be described in any way other than ‘populist.’ First he hedged his own continued career on the referendum, promising to resign if it fails, effectively making it into a contest on his popularity. Then he hedged his campaign itself on a single message: “Basta Un Sì”, or “Just One Yes is Enough” — the implication being, to change Italy for the better. Subsequent campaigning mostly centred on a largely abstract idea of a no vote encouraging political stagnation. Whether you would have agreed with the proposed reforms or no, it is fairly obvious that Renzi engaged in a form of populism: he abstracted a complicated constitutional question to two concepts, one being his personal popularity or lack thereof, and the other being the desire of Italians for change in whatever form possible. He did not try to defend the proposed reform on the basis of argument instead of just sloganeering.
In Latin America, some commentators, mostly of a conservative or centre-right persuasion, have hailed a seeming turn away from ‘left-wing’ populism in the style of Chavez towards free-market liberalism. However, this is all based on a simple and very conservative prejudice that assumes a centre-right politician, especially a liberal, cannot be a populist, which is simply untrue. As other commentators rightly point out, many of these new ‘non-populist’ governments are hugely unpopular, lacking in substance, and equally inclined towards institutional manipulation. Chavista populism might have failed in Latin America just as far-right populism had done before, but it has been replaced by centre-right populism, equally empty and devoid of meaning.
Just as far-right populists use immigrants, foreign powers, ethnic or religious minorities, etc. as bogeymen, centrist, liberal populists — for lack of a better phrase — use populism as a kind of bogeyman, a seemingly straightforward political enemy to use as an antithesis to themselves in a politically convenient way. Maybe that, ultimately, will be the legacy of the populist wave of 2016 — of Brexit, and Trump, and of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders’ failed attempts to ride that wave. Populism has forced even non-populist politicians, whether left, centre-left, centre or centre-right, to adopt the language of populism. It has normalised oversimplifying politics and providing unrealistically simple solutions to complicated problems with no straightforward answers.
Only time can truly tell if this trend can be reversed.
Edited by Maryam Elahi
