Political Right Party Movement in Europe

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Chapter 3 Populism and mobilization

The definition advanced in this book does not tell us much about the ways in which political actors can use populism to mobilize the masses. By highlighting the existence of different types of populist mobilization we can better understand why certain populist experiences are electorally more successful, and longer lasting, than others. Before continuing, it is worth noting that populism is generally associated with a strong (male) leader, whose charismatic personal appeal, rather than ideological program, is the basis of his support. While charismatic (male) leaders are important to populism, populist mobilization is not always linked to a charismatic leader. Our short survey of past and contemporary examples of populist forces across the world shows that populism is associated with different forms of mobilization.

By mobilization we mean the engagement of a wide range of individuals to raise awareness of a particular problem, leading them to act collectively to support their cause. Overall, three types of populist mobilization can be identified: personalist leadership, social movement, and political party. While many populist actors can be neatly categorized in just one of these three categories, some have aspects of two or three, either at one time or over time. As these three types show, populist mobilization can be top-down (personalist leadership), bottom-up (social movement), or both

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(political party). How populist actors mobilize is partly determined by the political system they operate in, while the durability of their success is strongly affected by the type of mobilization.

Personalist leadership

The quintessential form of populist mobilization is that of an individual who, largely independent of an existing party organization, campaigns and gathers support on the basis of his personal appeal. Think of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Beppe Grillo in Italy, Ross Perot in the United States, or Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand. In all these cases most supporters felt a personal(ized) connection to the leader, who mobilized purely top-down. The leaders connect directly to the supporters, largely unmediated through a strong political or social organization. While top-down mobilization is not unique to populist leaders, they are definitely more prone to it.

Where does this empirical affinity between populism and personalist leadership stem from? The answer to this question lies partly in the nature of the populist set of ideas, which considers both “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite” as homogeneous groups. Hence, the populist leader can claim to be the personification of the people (as, admittedly, could any other member of “the people”). In some cases the populist leader is not just the core of the political movement but also of its political identity; just think about Chavismo in Venezuela, Fortuynism in the Netherlands, and Peronism in Argentina.

In most cases, however, populist leaders do build some type of political organization around them, often seen as a necessary evil to be able to successfully contest elections. Technically speaking, this organization is a political party, i.e., a political group that presents one or more candidates for public office in elections. But

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in many cases the organization is largely a façade, as there are few members, committees, or internal structures. This is why we prefer to label this type of pseudo-organization a personalist electoral vehicle, i.e., a more or less ad hoc and powerless political structure that has been built, and is fully controlled, by a strong leader with the specific purpose of contesting elections.

By developing a personalist electoral vehicle, without being tied to a strong political organization, the populist leader can portray himself as a clean actor, who is able to be the voice of the “man in the street” since there are no intermediaries between him and “the people.” For instance, Correa won the 2006 Ecuadorean presidential election by rejecting the establishment and creating a new political party that did not present candidates for Congress. Correa argued that political parties are fraudulent organizations. He promised to draft a new constitution by convening a constituent assembly, which had the task of constructing an institutional framework that allegedly respected popular sovereignty. A similar pattern of personalist mobilization can be seen in the case of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who constructed a political party that in reality is just a personalist electoral vehicle. As the sole member of the Party for Freedom (PVV) Wilders decides who is allowed to represent the party in various legislatures and how they should act and vote.

Although personalist leadership can be found around the world, it is more prevalent in certain regions, such as Latin America. Throughout the three waves of Latin American populism the modal type of mobilization has been personalist leadership, from Perón in the first wave through Fujimori in the second wave to Correa in the third wave. This is also the case in most non-Western countries where populists have successfully mobilized, such as South Korea and Taiwan. What these countries have in common is that they are developing democracies with a presidential system and relatively weak institutionalized political parties.

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Example: Alberto Fujimori in Peru At the end of the 1980s Peru faced not only a serious economic crisis, but also the rise of the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path. Under these circumstances, a completely unknown figure, Alberto Fujimori, rose to power by developing a populist campaign criticizing the establishment for the dramatic crisis threatening the country and presenting himself as a “pure” person, who wanted to get rid of the corrupt elite. By exalting his Japanese background, Fujimori framed himself as an outsider without links to the white elite and thus as someone who, like the majority of “the people,” had experienced racial discrimination. Not by coincidence, one of the slogans of his campaign was “A President Like You.” This slogan constituted a subtle attack against his main opponent, the famous writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a well-known member of the Peruvian cultural and political establishment, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.

Fujimori was elected president in 1990, but he did not have a political party behind him and thus had no way of controlling Congress. He created a personalist electoral vehicle called Change 90, which was formed with the help of two minor organizations with little in common: an association of small entrepreneurs and a network of Protestant Evangelicals. The personnel working for Change 90 were so unimportant and inexperienced that Fujimori did not include a single member of the party in his first cabinet. He opted to govern with independents, active or retired military officers, and some individuals from other parties.

To wage the 1995 national elections, Fujimori created a new party called New Majority, which obtained a majority in Congress, but almost all legislators (MPs) were political novices handpicked by Fujimori and his confidants. After poor results in the 1998 municipal elections he decided to form yet another new political party for the 2000 national elections, this time called the Independent Front Peru 2000. In a heavily tainted process,

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Fujimori was able to win the presidency but he could not secure a majority in Congress. As a consequence, he started to systematically bribe opposition MPs to support his government, which would become his downfall. Under investigation for bribery, Fujimori faxed his resignation as president during a visit to Japan, where he would stay for several years to evade prison in Peru.

All in all, Fujimori competed in elections with political organizations that were extremely weak and completely under his own control. Consequently, when his daughter Keiko decided to enter politics several years later, she was compelled to build her new political party practically from scratch, even though it includes some leaders who supported and worked in the Fujimorista government. Through the new party, Popular Force, Keiko Fujimori has been able to construct a common identity uniting local elites and grassroots organizations sympathetic to her father’s government.

Social movement

Demonstrations, marches, and rallies are regular political phenomena in contemporary societies. They are examples of political mobilization in which individuals come together to put pressure on powerful actors. When protests are not episodic occurrences, but endure over time, we are dealing with a social movement. Social movements are usually described as informal networks (or “networks of networks”) characterized by a continuous engagement of individuals and political groups that have a clear adversary and seek to promote collective action in the pursuit of a common objective. Iconic examples of (new) social movements include the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the western European environmental movements of the 1970s.

Social movements are informal networks that bring together people with a shared identity and a common opponent who

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engage in noninstitutionalized collective action to pursue a goal. Their preference for noninstitutionalized collective action, over the more usual electoral behavior, is often caused by the lack of access to the decision-making process. Therefore, social movements are different from both political parties and interest groups, which normally have a formal organization and participate on a regular basis in the decision-making process.

When it comes to defining a common identity and a common enemy, social movements have to develop a frame through which they identify the most important social grievances affecting society. In the process of frame construction, social movements normally resort to different ideological frameworks. For instance, the labor movement often employed Marxist ideas to construct a frame, in which the business community was portrayed as the common enemy and the workers were depicted as the aggrieved population. Nothing keeps social movements from using populism to construct a frame. However, this does not occur very often. Most social movements seek to develop a common identity for a specific group of individuals, such as students, women, workers, etc. In contrast, populism speaks about “the people” as one homogeneous category; it is a set of ideas that assumes that a broad group of individuals—though not the whole society—should act to regain its sovereignty, which has been stolen by a “corrupt elite.” Consequently, populism is not very helpful for the construction of frames targeted at specific constituencies (i.e., subgroups of “the people”).

An interesting aspect about populist social movements is that they are examples of bottom-up mobilization. In fact, populist social movements normally lack centralized leadership or a dominant leader—which is not necessarily to say that they are leaderless. Certain figures can play a significant role from time to time, but the key strength of a populist social movement relies on its capacity to interpret a widespread feeling of anger with the establishment and to convincingly propose that the solution lies in

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the sovereign people. As a consequence, events such as major corruption scandals involving high-ranking individuals from across different groups of the establishment or serious violations of the principle of popular sovereignty are propitious for the emergence of populist social movements. In contrast, political contexts in which specific groups feel discriminated against (e.g., youth) or aim to reform a limited policy sector (e.g., ecology) are not very conducive to the rise of populist social movements.

Looking at the contemporary world, the Great Recession has facilitated the rise of a wide variety of populist social movements across the globe. Occupy Wall Street in the United States and the so-called Indignados in Spain are good examples of this. Whereas the former developed the slogan “we are the 99%,” the motto of the latter was “real democracy now—we are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.” Both social movements had a clear populist tone, portraying “the political caste” (la casta) and the business community as “the corrupt elite” while defining the homogeneous people (“the 99%”) as the only source of political legitimacy. And while both movements tried to develop a definition of “the people” that was inclusive to most marginalized minorities—including ethnic, religious, and sexual—its moral exclusion of “the elite,” in terms of interests and values, was as essential as with the more exclusionary populist movements on the political right.

Example: The Tea Party in the United States Although the groundswells of the movement go back much longer, many popular accounts place the origins of the Tea Party movement in the on-air rant of CNBC host Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009. Protesting the bailout policies of Democratic president Barack Obama, even though they were initiated by his Republican predecessor President George W. Bush, Santelli turned to the traders on the floor and shouted “It’s time for another Tea Party,” referencing the Boston Tea Party of 1773, an anti-tax protest

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against the British government that served as the prelude to the American Revolution. While this media event undoubtedly boosted the nascent movement, the Tea Party is in many ways just the newest form of conservative populist outrage in the United States.

The Tea Party movement was built upon a plethora of loosely organized grassroots right-wing populist activists, such as blogger Keli Carender (known as “Liberty Bell”), and groups, such as Tea Party Patriots, as well as professionally organized national conservative groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. The coalition of so-called grassroots and Astroturf groups was problematic from the outset, as many grassroots supporters considered the Astroturf professionals as part of the corrupt elite. Moreover, as the Tea Party became more closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP), not in the least because of the Astroturf groups, the more populist parts of the movement turned away from common national campaigns and directed their attention more to local and regional battles, particularly in the American Midwest and South.

But even the grassroots part of the Tea Party movement entails a great diversity of causes and groups, including those that are more libertarian, social conservative, religious fundamentalist, and white supremacist. Various aspiring leaders have emerged, ranging from right-wing television personality Glenn Beck to Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, but all are linked to specific subgroups, consequently finding at least as much opposition as support within the amorphous movement. Even former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who had become a national and international celebrity after John McCain selected her as his running mate in 2008, got caught up in the fight between individual Tea Party groups, receiving strong criticism for charging huge speaker fees at (for profit) Tea Party group meetings.

Like other grassroots populist movements before it, the Tea Party quickly lost its national momentum, in part because of its lack of

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national leadership and organization, even if certain groups remain influential at the subnational level. Nevertheless, some GOP leaders who have been close to the Tea Party have been able to compete in the 2016 presidential primaries (e.g., Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio), even if much of the base has supported the GOP outsider Donald Trump, and it is an open question how much impact the Tea Party will have on both the GOP leadership and the party base in the near future.

Political party

The American political scientist E. E. Schattschneider famously proclaimed that you cannot have democracy without political parties. This is only a slight exaggeration. Contemporary democracy is undoubtedly a form of government that hinges upon

4. The Tea Party is a populist movement that became influential in the United States after the onset of the Great Recession in the late 2000s. Its grassroots organizations, which are not directly controlled by elected politicians, organize gatherings such as this one in Mishawaka, Indiana, in 2009.

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political parties. They play at least three key functions in the democratic system. First, political parties are organizations that seek to aggregate the interests of different sectors of society. Second, political parties elaborate policy programs that work as their pledges to the voting public, who can evaluate these programs to decide whom to vote for in elections. Third, political parties invest time and resources to train personnel, who are crucial for both running elections as well as implementing the proposed reforms through public offices.

These three key functions of political parties are closely related to the very process of political representation. Modern democracies are a particular type of political regime in which voters are free to elect officials, who represent them by deciding matters on their behalf. These representatives are normally individuals working in political parties, i.e., political organizations that present candidates for public office in elections. As political parties compete for votes, they have to detect the issues that are salient to the electorate and create a corresponding policy program. In this process of discovering issues and constructing a program, party activists, members, and leaders interact closely. Consequently, the party is more than just a leader. Both the institution and the ideology may be linked to a strong leader, but they are not fully dependent upon one. Hence, parties often are able to survive a specific leader.

Given that populism is usually employed to attack the establishment, pundits and academics are prone to argue that it is against political representation. After all, populist actors and constituencies normally claim that existing political parties are corrupt organizations. This does not mean, however, that populism is intrinsically at odds with political representation. What populists want is to have their representatives in power, i.e., representatives of “the people.” Accordingly, populist political parties use populism to challenge the establishment and to give voice to groups that feel unrepresented. In effect, the rise of

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populist parties and their electoral strength is directly related to their capacity to politicize certain issues, which intentionally or unintentionally are not being adequately addressed by existing political parties. As soon as populist parties become relevant and are able to own an issue, they win a space in the political landscape, forcing others parties to react and take their concerns into account. While social movement can do this too, the added ability to win votes (and seats) often makes populist parties more effective.

Despite the ideological tensions between populism and parties, political parties are the paradigmatic type of populist mobilization in much of Europe. Today a majority of European countries have at least one successful populist party; a populist party is among the three largest parties in roughly one-third of the countries. While some populist parties live up to the stereotype of the flash party, many of these are better categorized as ad hoc electoral vehicles constructed by personalist leaders than as real political parties. This applies both to the prototypical example of the Poujadist party and to more recent cases like the People’s Movement for Latvia (TKL). Unsurprisingly, many of these parties are officially named after their leader, like the Austrian Team Stronach or the Dutch List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), or they are commonly known for their leader; for instance, TKL was more broadly known as the Siegerist Party, after party leader Werner Joachim Siegerist.

Many of the more relevant western European right-wing populist parties are relatively well-established organizations that have been around for two or more decades. Most notably, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and Swiss People’s Party (SVP) were founded in 1956 and 1971, respectively, and while both parties changed ideologically, they have maintained organizational continuity. But even “new” right-wing populist parties like the FN and Norwegian Progress Party (FrP) date back to the 1970s, while the Belgian Flemish Interest (VB) and Italian Northern

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League (LN) were founded in the early and late 1980s, respectively. All these parties have slowly but steadily built and institutionalized a solid party organization with often several auxiliary organizations, such as youth branches. Even in eastern Europe, where few parties pre-date the fall of communism in 1989 and most parties are volatile and weak, some populist parties are quite stable and well organized. Examples include the left-wing populist Direction-Social Democracy (Smer) in Slovakia and the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland.

Example: National Front in France The National Front (FN) was founded as a coalition of a broad variety of far right groupuscules, ranging from the neo-fascist New Order to ultra-orthodox Catholics of the Lefebre sect, held together exclusively by the overpowering leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen. After a slow beginning, during which the party was not much more than the sum of its parts, counting a mere 14,000 members in the mid-1980s, the FN set out to develop its own organization under the competent management of Bruno Mégret. It was hurt badly by a split between the Le Pen and Mégret camps in 1999, in which the party lost most of its competent party organizers and about two-thirds of its cadres. Experiencing a rebirth under Marine Le Pen, the FN has almost quadrupled its membership, from a mere 22,000 to some 83,000, since she succeeded her father as party leader in 2011.

Despite the nominally democratic party statutes, the power structure of the FN is extremely centralized. The party leader is elected by the party congress and can and does face serious competitors, but is extremely powerful once elected. Marine Le Pen exerts disproportionate influence through an extensive myriad of organizations headed by people appointed by, and responsible to, her. In fact, when she took over, her father was named “president for life,” an honorary function that could not protect him from being thrown out of the party later on, after an increasingly public feud between father and daughter. Although

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the party congress had to approve his expulsion, and he had legal recourse within the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen was only saved by a civil court case that ruled in his favor and forced the FN to reinstate him.

Today the FN organization spreads across the whole territory of France, including its overseas territories. It has a strong and very active youth organization, the National Front of the Youth (FNJ), boasting some 25,000 members. The FN even has an organization for “French abroad,” organized in eleven geographically organized branches, claiming members in eighty countries around the world. To become better connected with blue-collar workers, its strongest electorate, the party has created several trade unions, particularly for sectors that are traditionally sympathetic to FN ideals (e.g., police officers and prison guards). As the modest wins in trade union elections have been invalidated by the fiercely anti-FN traditional trade unions, the FN has embarked upon an increasingly successful strategy of “entryism,” in which its members “infiltrate” traditional unions and their leadership.

A dynamic model

While most examples of populist mobilization fit neatly into one of these three types, at least at a specific point (or period) in time, in many cases populist mobilization is a process that goes through different stages. Almost all populist mobilization starts without a strong organizational structure, perhaps except when a populist leader takes over an existing, well-organized political party and transforms it from a nonpopulist into a populist party. Interestingly, this is an increasingly common trajectory in Europe.

Many of the successful European populist parties, both on the left and on the right, started out as nonpopulist parties. For instance, in Germany the populist party The Left (Die Linke) is the successor to the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was an elitist Marxist-Leninist

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organization. Two of the most successful populist radical right parties in western Europe, the FPÖ in Austria and the SVP in Switzerland, started out as nonpopulist parties, although with significant populist factions. After being elected party leader, Jörg Haider and Christopher Blocher, respectively, transformed the established nonpopulist party into a populist radical right party. In exceptional cases a long-serving leader can transform a nonpopulist party into a populist party, as is the case with Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary.

While these examples show that leaders can be very powerful within populist parties, this does not mean that these organizations were personalist electoral vehicles of their leader. Even after their power grab and party transformation, which led to significant electoral successes, Haider and Blocher endured significant opposition from within their own party—both from populists and from nonpopulists. Within the FPÖ the opposition was so fierce that Haider eventually chose to leave “his” party to found a new one, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ). Interestingly, outside of his regional stronghold of Carinthia, most of the voters remained loyal to the old party (FPÖ) and did not follow the old leader to the new party (BZÖ).

In most cases, however, populist mobilization is unrelated to an existing political organization. The common model is a personalist leader who constructs an ad hoc electoral vehicle, i.e., top-down mobilization around a strong populist leader. In many cases this mobilization is either unsuccessful or it falls apart shortly after achieving electoral breakthrough. Populist leaders who are able to mobilize more or less successfully for a few elections tend to build a political party, however halfheartedly and reluctantly, to consolidate their power and increase their effectiveness.

Despite their predominance many populist parties actually survive the founder-leader, even if they often go through a period of electoral decline and weak leadership. Some even move from one

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strong leader to another, as was the case in both the FN (from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Marine Le Pen) and the FPÖ (from Haider to Heinz-Christian Strache). In other cases, the death of the founder-leader can help to unite different factions with the aim of constructing a political party that seeks to keep the populist set of ideas alive. Examples of this can be found in Latin America, where the death of Perón paved the way for the consolidation of the Argentine Justicialist Party, while the death of Chávez seems to have contributed to the strengthening of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Social movements are a fairly rare type of populist mobilization, although it is the modal type in the United States, from the agrarian populist movement of the late 19th century to the populist movements on the right and the left of the early 21st century. Like other social movements, populist social movements tend to be episodic and local in the absence of a strong national leader or organization. The recent Occupy Wall Street movement is a perfect example of populism that never outlived its short-lived social movement phase. Few populist social movements are able to last for more than a few years. Those that survive tend to have connections to more organized groups, like the Tea Party, and to the broad and diverse networks of right-wing local and national groups, including the Republican Party.

Once a populist social movement finds a strong leader tensions emerge between leader and movement. The movement will quickly lose momentum particularly if the leader is able to build a political party and attract a significant part of the key activists and media attention. This happened recently in India, where the populist social movement India against Corruption (IAC), which emerged in the wake of an unprecedented wave of high-level corruption in 2011, largely disappeared when Arvind Kejriwal, one member of its five-man leadership called “Team Anna,” founded the Common Man Party (AAP) and started to contest elections with various levels of success. Similarly, the Spanish Indignados,

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which emerged in protest of rising inequality and corruption in 2011, was eclipsed by Podemos, which followed a manifesto signed by thirty intellectuals and personalities and, despite ideological resistance, is strongly focused on the party founder and leader, the political science professor Pablo Iglesias Turrión.

Finally, a very exceptional case can be found in contemporary Bolivia, where all three types of populist mobilization are simultaneously at play. Evo Morales is a personalist populist leader, who is strongly connected to social movements that opposed neoliberal policies and fought for a better representation of ethnic groups in the 2000s. Morales was elected president of the country in 2006 and the political party behind him, Movement toward Socialism (MAS), has close relationships with these social movements. At the same time, MAS is a strong political organization, which, despite its loyalty to Morales, has different factions and an institutional structure across the whole country. Important tensions exist between the three types of

5. Evo Morales is widely respected as Bolivia’s first president to come from the indigenous population. He leads a populist government that has implemented major leftist reforms since his rise to power in 2006. Not by chance, his slogan reads, “Building the new Bolivia.”

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populist mobilization in the country. For example, at certain times social movements have forced Evo Morales to change his position on specific reforms. And while he continues to be the undisputed leader of the party, debate is ongoing within the party about who should replace him in the near future.

Conclusion

Populists mobilize in a variety of different ways. We discussed the three main types of populist mobilization: personalist leadership, social movement, and political party. Two important questions remain unanswered, however. First: Why are some types of populist mobilization more prevalent in certain places than in others? Second: Do these different types of populist mobilization have an impact on the electoral success of populism?

Let’s begin by offering a preliminary answer to the first question. Populist actors do not operate in a political vacuum. Various political contexts set conditions and provide incentives that are more or less favorable to the three different types of populist mobilization. Having said that, probably the most relevant factor is whether populism comes to the fore in a presidential or in a parliamentary system. More generally, presidential systems strengthen personalist leadership, while parliamentary systems incentivize the emergence of political parties. Consequently, populist leaders without an attachment to a political party can gain prominence and even win the executive power in presidential systems. In fact, this has occurred several times in Latin America (e.g., Perón, Fujimori, Correa). By contrast, in parliamentary systems the person who controls the executive is nominated by one or more political parties represented in the parliament. It is therefore not a coincidence that almost all populist forces in Europe are more or less well-organized political parties.

When it comes to analyzing the rise of populist social movements, the distinction between presidential and parliamentary systems

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does not seem to be crucial. Rather, like other social movements, they will mainly develop in democracies that have a restricted “political opportunity structure” (POS). Among the more restrictive POS institutions are a majoritarian electoral system, a related two-party system, and high (financial) barriers to influence politics through elections or lobbying. Seen in this light, the predominance of the social movement type of populist mobilization in the United States makes sense. Although populist sentiments are widespread within U.S. society, politics is dominated by just two broad parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—that have been highly successful in preventing the rise of viable third parties. Although mainstream politicians in the United States regularly use populist rhetoric, populist mobilization is only really feasible outside of the party structure, in social movements like the Tea Party, that are often closely related to one of the two parties.

This leaves us to address the second question: Do the types of populist mobilization have a different impact on the electoral success of populism? To answer this question properly, it is important to bear in mind that electoral success can be defined in two different ways: electoral breakthrough, which refers to winning enough votes to enter the political arena (e.g., parliament or presidency), and electoral persistence, which means the ability to develop into a stable force within the political system.

Without doubt, populists can achieve electoral breakthrough through personalist leadership. This is particularly true when the populist leader is a charismatic figure, who has adequate credentials to portray him- or herself as an outsider and has the ability to establish a direct link with the masses. However, these types of leaders are usually very bad at building institutions. By constructing a personalist electoral platform, rather than a well-organized political party with competent activists and personnel, they have serious problems at succeeding in terms of electoral persistence. For instance, Alberto Fujimori was able

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to win three presidential elections, but his party disappeared once he left the country in the year 2000—forcing his daughter to try to build a political party from the ashes of her father’s personalist electoral vehicle.

Given that populist political parties employ a radical language, they normally have to confront the reactions of mainstream political parties as well of civil society organizations and the media. The stronger these responses, the more difficult it is for populist parties to develop a well-functioning organization that recruits competent personnel. As a consequence, populist parties often achieve electoral breakthrough, but they fail at establishing electoral persistence. Some populist parties are able to survive big electoral defeats at the national level because of particular local or regional strongholds, from which the party can try to launch a national revival. Many European populist radical right parties have such local strongholds, such as the VB in Antwerp and the SVP in Zurich. The most extreme example was the Austrian BZÖ, whose national representation in the federal parliament was solely based on the phenomenal support in Haider’s home state of Carinthia.

Populist social movements have an ambivalent impact on the electoral success of populism. The rise of a populist social movement certainly gives more visibility to the populist set of ideas, but this does not automatically lead to the electoral breakthrough of populist actors. For instance, there are no signs that the Occupy Wall Street movement has contributed significantly to the election of left-wing populist politicians—although it might have bolstered the campaigns of more progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. However, this is different when a strong populist social movement is connected to, or mobilizes partly within, an established political party, as is the case with the Tea Party and the Republican Party in the United States. While the Tea Party has not been able to gain control of the national party, it has played a major role in some primaries and has been instrumental

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in increasing the populist representation within Republican delegations in state and federal legislatures.

The biggest chance at electoral persistence, however, occurs when a populist social movement is able to either build a new political party or transform an existing one. In fact, many of the most successful political parties have arisen from social movements, which provide organizational resources that are crucial to establish well-functioning political parties. Just think about the influence of the labor movement in the rise of socialist and social democratic parties in Europe and Latin America. A paradigmatic example of a populist social movement triggering both the electoral breakthrough and the persistence of a populist party is MAS, whose leader Morales has won the last three consecutive presidential and parliamentary elections in Bolivia.

Chapter 4 The populist leader

Leaders are central to most political phenomena and populism is certainly no exception. Many scholars argue that, above and beyond its diverse manifestations, a defining feature of populism is its reliance on strong leaders who are able to mobilize the masses and/or conduct their parties with the aim of enacting radical reforms. It is true that many manifestations of populism have given rise to flamboyant and strong political leaders. From Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, populism is often guided by strong leaders, who, through their behavior and speech, present themselves as the vox populi (voice of the people). This has led the British political scientist Paul Taggart to state that populism “requires the most extraordinary individuals to lead the most ordinary of people.”

As populism is first and foremost a set of ideas, which can be employed by very different actors, there is no such thing as the prototypical populist leader. The charismatic strongman, the stereotypical populist leader in academic and popular writing, does describe some of the better known populist leaders, but such an individual is mostly successful in specific societies. Depending on the political culture of the country in which the populist leader mobilizes, her or his “extraordinary” nature lies in very specific and different features. What all populist leaders do have in common, however, is that they present themselves as the voice

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of the people, which means as both political outsiders and authentic representatives of the common people. This image is carefully constructed by the populist leader, based on a plethora of personal characteristics, and does not always reflect reality.

The charismatic strongman

In both academic and popular debates the populist leader is implicitly or explicitly defined as a charismatic strongman. In Latin America the stereotypical populist leader is the caudillo, a generic term with roots in the Latin caput (head), which normally alludes to a strong leader, who exercises a power that is independent of any office and free of any constraint. Populist strongmen tend to rule on the basis of a “cult of the leader,” which portrays him as a masculine and potentially violent figure.

The link between populism and strongmen goes back to president Juan Domingo Péron of Argentina, the original populist caudillo, who is, for many, still the personification of Latin American populism. An army colonel turned civil politician, Péron served in both authoritarian and democratic governments. A more recent example of a populist strongman is the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, another military man turned into a successful civil politician. Non–Latin American strongmen tend to lack a military background, but they share the other features. Examples include former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, former Slovak prime minister Vladimír Mečiar, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

While there is a close association between populist leaders and strongmen, it is important not to conflate the two. In fact, only a minority of strongmen are populists and only a minority of populists is a strongman. The notion of the strongman is often related to authoritarian regimes. Leaders like Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina (1793–1877), Porfirio Díaz in Mexico (1830–1915), and Francisco Franco in Spain (1892–1975) are common examples of

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strongmen in the scholarly literature. All these leaders can be considered as absolute rulers and thus anything but democrats. But as populism maintains an ambivalent relationship with democracy, the authoritarian characteristic of the strongman is not inherent to populism.

Many political leaders present themselves as a strong leader, but populist strongmen take it a step further, crafting an image of a man of action, rather than words, who is not afraid to take difficult and quick decisions, even against “expert” advice. Drawing upon anti-intellectualism and a sense of urgency, often largely created by the populist themselves, he will argue that the situation (“crisis”) requires “bold action” and “common sense solutions.” In an example of life imitating art, Philippine actor-turned-politician Joseph “Erap” Estrada even built his political image upon his movie characters, which all were heroic defenders of the poor and oppressed.

This image of the strongman is frequently combined with an emphasis on the virility of the populist leader. For example, Estrada responded to a young woman’s claim that she was his illegitimate daughter by saying that this might well be true, as “many women want babies with me.” Few populists have so passionately cultivated the image of the virile man as Silvio Berlusconi. While opponents tried to turn his infamous bunga bunga (sex) parties into political scandals, il Cavaliere (The Knight) used the media attention to emphasize his virility, only strongly denying the accusation that he had paid for sex with call girls at the parties. “For those who love to conquer, the joy and the most beautiful satisfaction is in the conquest. If you have to pay, what joy is there?” he once said in an interview.

Populist leaders in general, and strongmen in particular, also use simple and even vulgar language, a so-called Stammtisch (beer table) discourse. They present themselves as “one of the boys,” a man’s man, talking sports and women rather than politics and

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6. Silvio Berlusconi was a polemical populist leader who served as prime minister of Italy several times during the 1990s and 2000s. In 2007 he launched his new political party, Il Popolo della Libertà (The People of Freedom), which fused together two previous existing right-wing political organizations: Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale.

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policies. They relate to “the common man” by playing on sexist stereotypes and by using coarse language. A perfect example is the former leader of the Italian right-wing populist Northern League (LN), Umberto Bossi, who would excite crowds by saying that “the League has a hard-on” while literally giving the finger to Rome (i.e., the elite).

Perhaps the most contentious feature of the populist strongman is charisma. According to the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), charismatic leadership refers to the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. Weber believed that charismatic leadership would thrive particularly in times of crisis, when people seek refuge in the specific characteristics of certain individuals, often political outsiders, rather than in the most common sources of authority (i.e., custom and statute). Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership has strongly influenced scholarship on populism, although this is not always explicitly acknowledged.

The popular understanding of charisma is a set of extraordinary personal qualities of the leader, which are considered universal. What these features are, however, is a topic of intense debate and confusion. Terms such as “popular” and “strong” are often used to capture charisma, and thereby explain popularity, which tends to be tautological. Popular leaders are described as “strong” because of their popularity, while unpopular leaders are portrayed as “weak” because of their lack of popularity.

In a Weberian understanding, charismatic leadership is about a specific bond between leader and followers, which is defined at least as much by the expectations and perceptions of the followers as by the individual characteristics of the leader. Hence, it makes little sense to look for certain universal features of charisma. Rather, charisma and its individual features are culturally

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determined; what is considered charismatic in, say, Sweden will differ from what is considered charismatic in, say, Peru.

This notwithstanding, some fairly straightforward cases of charismatic populist leaders, who established a direct link with their supporters, can be cited. The most evident cases are populist leaders who have been able to gain significant popular support without the backing of a strong organization or clear political philosophy, such as former Brazilian president Collor de Mello or the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. When populists are leaders of well-organized political parties with a well-defined program, it is more difficult to establish whether support is based on loyalty to the party, support for the program, or a charismatic bond with the leader. Stressing the importance of individual leaders for the electoral success of populist parties, commentators have come up with terms such as the “Le Pen effect” or the “Haider phenomenon.” In both cases, however, the charisma of the leader seems to have had only a temporary effect, i.e., bringing (new) supporters into the party electorate. Once in, they were socialized into more solid support by both the party organization and the party ideology. This fact, rather than the charisma of the leaders, also explains the somewhat surprising finding that many of these parties have exceptionally loyal supporters, who stick with their party even after a change in leadership.

Some scholars have argued that charismatic leadership can be institutionalized within political organizations, leading to “charismatic parties” rather than mere charismatic leaders. Given the existing diversity in organizational structures, it would go too far, however, to argue that populist parties are by definition charismatic parties. Others have focused on the internal rather than the external effects of charismatic leadership, arguing that certain populist leaders have “coterie charisma,” which ties an inner core of activists to a specific leader. This enables the “charismatic” leader to overcome internal divisions within a broader movement. Examples of populist leaders with strong coterie charisma would

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be FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who single-handedly kept an extremely heterogeneous coalition of far right groups together, or Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder-leader of the seriously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR).

The vox populi

Given that populist politics is essentially a struggle of “the pure people” against “the corrupt elite,” and pretends to defend popular sovereignty at any cost, it is crucial for populist leaders to present themselves as the true voice of the people. Just as “the people” and “the elite” are constructions, although usually based on a warped interpretation of reality, the vox populi is a construction of the populist leader—ironically often unwittingly reinforced by the anti-populist rhetoric of the establishment. This construction consists of two distinct but interrelated processes: (1) separation from the elite and (2) connection to the people. Whereas the former process is related to the outsider-status of populist leaders, the latter process is linked to their claimed authenticity.

Populist leaders have to convince their followers that they do not belong to the (corrupt) elite but are part of the (pure) people. The populist strongman does this by emphasizing action and masculinity, playing into cultural stereotypes of the people, and by proposing “common sense” solutions at odds with the opinion of experts. But other populist leaders have to be more creative. We will here illustrate how three groups of more unlikely populist actors portray themselves as voices of the people by using their gender, profession, and ethnicity.

Women Despite the fact that the stereotype of the strongman continues to dominate the public perception of populism, there are many examples of female populist leaders. Probably the first famous female populist was Eva Péron (1919–1952), the second wife of Juan Domingo Péron, who continues to inspire ordinary

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Argentinians and famous foreigners alike (like U.S. pop singer Madonna). Some contemporary female populists are also related to populist strongmen, such as Marine Le Pen in France and Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand. But many female populist leaders are self-made women who have built their own political careers. Probably the best example is Pauline Hanson, who founded the One Nation Party (ONP) in Australia and who was the main reason for the party’s, admittedly short-lived, success. Other examples are Pia Kjærsgaard, the former leader of the Danish People’s Party (DF); Frauke Petry, the current leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD); Siv Jensen, the current leader of the Norwegian Progress party (FrP); and Sarah Palin, the firebrand ex-governor of Alaska.

Just like populist strongmen, female populist leaders draw upon gendered notions of society to construct their image of the vox

7. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, speaks in front of a statue of Joan of Arc during the 2011 May Day celebration in Paris. The location was far from coincidental, as the French National Front is a populist radical right party that has won success by redefining French nationhood.

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populi. Most notably, they use their sex to construct their outsider status. The mere fact that a populist leader is female, whereas the vast majority of the (political) elite is male, strengthens her image as a political outsider. For example, Palin emphasized her opposition to “the good-ol’ boys” network in Alaskan and U.S. politics. On top of that, gendered notions of society help female populists to present themselves as reluctant politicians. When she entered politics, Hanson declared, “I come here not as a polished politician, but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks.”

To connect themselves to the pure people, many female populists emphasize features of the “good woman,” as defined by their culture, often presenting themselves primarily as mothers or wives. This helps them to appear as “authentic” and generate a bond with constituencies feeling ignored by the establishment. Palin famously coined the term “hockey mom,” adjusting the more common term of “soccer mom” to her specific Alaskan context, as well as “mama grizzly,” feeding off gendered stereotypes of the fiercely protective mother. In a particularly instructive gendered blend of nationalism and populism, Hanson stated: “I care so passionately about this country, it’s like I’m its mother, Australia is my home and the Australian people are my children.”

Entrepreneurs Another rather common but largely ignored populist leader is the economic entrepreneur. Some of the most famous populists were successful businessmen who belonged to the richest people in their country before becoming the voice of the common people. Forbes estimated the family fortune of the Shinawatras at $1.6 billion in 2015, making them the tenth richest family in Thailand, while it assessed the wealth of the Berlusconi family at a staggering $7.8 billion, the sixth richest family in Italy. The fortune of Ross Perot, the populist candidate who obtained almost 20 percent of the vote in the 1992 U.S. presidential elections, is valued at roughly $3.7 billion, making him the 155th richest person in the United States in 2015.

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Because populism is based on a frontal attack against the establishment, the combination of “entrepreneur-populist” is not always easy to sell. But given that the populist distinction between the people and the elite is not fundamentally based on socioeconomic criteria—like class or wealth—but rather on morality, entrepreneur-populists are able to use their business acumen to construct their status as a political outsider. They present themselves as honest and self-made businessmen who have made their fortune despite the corrupt politicians, not because of them! Moreover, entrepreneur-populists claim to be reluctant politicians, who, unlike professional politicians, did not enter politics to profit from it financially. In the always colorful words of Berlusconi: “I don’t need to go into office for the power. I have houses all over the world, stupendous boats . . . beautiful airplanes, a beautiful wife, a beautiful family . . . I am making a sacrifice.”

For entrepreneur-populists, it would seem that, at first sight, connecting to the people is an impossible task. After all, their everyday lives could not be further removed from that of the “common man” they claim to represent. The average Italian doesn’t live in a completely renovated 17th-century country mansion, Villa Gernetto (Silvio Berlusconi), while the average Joe in the United States doesn’t have a museum named in their honor, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, thanks to a $50 million gift (Ross Perot). However, they often use their wealth to connect to “the people” and bestow an aura of authenticity, for example through sports. Most famously, Berlusconi bought AC Milan, one of the most popular soccer teams in Italy and the world, while Thaksin owned, albeit for a short time, Manchester City. In addition, populist entrepreneurs have been presidents of major soccer teams in their respective countries, including Moïse Katumbi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (TP Mazembe), Bernard Tapie in France (Olympique de Marseille), Gigi Becali in Romania (Steaua Bucharest), and the late Jesús Gil y Gil in Spain (Club Atlético de Madrid).

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Ethnic leaders The relationship between ethnicity and populism is much more complex than many accounts portray. Particularly in Europe the two are often conflated, a direct consequence of the predominance of populist radical right parties that combine authoritarianism, nativism, and populism. In Latin America the term ethnopopulism denotes a particular type of populism, most notably related to mobilization by indigenous peoples. While both types of populism use ethnicity to establish their authenticity, they do it in fundamentally different ways. For the European populist radical right ethnicity is not part of the populist distinction between the people and the elite, who are part of the same ethnic group, but rather of the nativist distinction between “natives” and “aliens,” in which the latter are considered to be part of neither the people nor the elite. In the case of Latin American ethnopopulism, on the other hand, the nation is defined as a multicultural unit, within which the people and elite are divided by both morality and ethnicity.

Evo Morales and his party MAS constitute the prototypical case of ethnopopulism. Morales is the first indigenous president of Bolivia, a country with a majority of indigenous people who have been systematically discriminated against. He has often used his ethnicity as proof of both his separation from the elite (outsider status) and his connection to the common people (authenticity). For instance, he usually argues that he descends from those who have inhabited the Americas for forty thousand years, whereas most members of the elite are of more recent European origin. Moreover, Morales often claims authenticity on the basis of his ethnicity, since he is a member of the Aymara, one of the two largest indigenous groups in Bolivia. One of his most famous statements is: “We Indians are Latin America’s moral reserve.” But, unlike ethnic populists in Europe, Morales and MAS are not exclusionary. In fact, the party has reached out not only to the Aymara and the Quechua—the two largest indigenous groups

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of the country—but also to mestizos and whites. As Morales once declared, “the most important thing is the indigenous people are not vindictive by nature. We are not here to oppress anybody—but to join together and build Bolivia, with justice and equality.”

But the populist leader does not even have to be part of the ethnic majority. As we have seen, Fujimori became one of the most popular politicians in Peru despite being part of the small Japanese minority in the country. Given that Peru is a strongly racialized society, where the elite are mainly of European descent, Fujimori’s status as an ethnic minority helped him to connect to the common people. As a fellow non-European Peruvian, he was included in the category of the excluded people. Moreover, belonging to an ethnic minority contributed to crafting an image of a political outsider of humble origins, who had risen thanks to personal talent rather than connections with the establishment. This image was reinforced by his main competitor, Mario Vargas Llosa, a well-known novelist who was white and of European descent.

The insider-outsider

As part of their status of political outsider, who has nothing in common with the political establishment, populist leaders often claim to be political novices. This assertion helps to separate themselves from both the unpopular policies of previous governments and the perceived corruption and incompetence of politicians in general. It also fits the image of the reluctant politician, who is favorably compared to the professional politicians of the mainstream. In sharp contrast to the professional “political class,” a popular term of populists, the populist claims to be driven to engage in politics not by personal ambition but by a higher calling, namely to bring politics (back) to the people. In reality, most populist leaders are very much part of the national elite. They often belong to the same sociodemographic strata as the political elite, i.e., highly educated,

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(upper) middle-class, middle-aged males of the majority ethnicity. And many of them have been politically active for years.

For example, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras started out as a member of the Communist Youth of Greece, while Collor de Mello had been elected on the ticket of many different parties before he became president of Brazil. Similarly, Wilders was an influential backbencher in charge of foreign policy in the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) before starting his one-man PVV. A few even held government positions before reinventing themselves as populist outsiders: Rafael Correa was finance minister in the government of Alfredo Palacio in Ecuador, Joseph Estrada served as vice president under President Fidel V. Ramos in the Philippines, and Roh Moo-hyun was minister of maritime affairs and fisheries in the administration of President Kim Dae-jung in South Korea.

Other populists have become politically active as a consequence of family connections, sometimes literally growing up within a populist party. This is the case with many, but certainly not all, prominent female populists: Isabel Péron was the widow of Juan Domingo Péron, Marine Le Pen and Keiko Fujimori are daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alberto Fujimori, respectively, while (short-term FPÖ chairwoman) Ursula Haubner and Yingluck Shinawatra are the sisters of Jörg Haider and Thaksin Shinawatra, respectively. All of them “inherited” their position as populist leader. To be clear, inherited leadership is neither specific to populists nor to women. Many female nonpopulist leaders in South Asia “inherited” their position from their father (e.g., Benazir Bhutto) or husband (e.g., Sonia Gandhi), but so have many male politicians in the West (such as Belgian premier Charles Michel and former U.S. president George W. Bush).

Overall, one can distinguish between three types of populists: outsiders, insider-outsiders, and insiders. True outsiders are very rare. They have no significant links to the elite, broadly defined

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(i.e., including cultural and economic elites), and build their career completely outside of the political mainstream. Among the few more prominent populist outsiders are Hugo Chávez and Alberto Fujimori. Chávez was a relatively low-ranked officer in the Venezuelan army who gained national notoriety only because of a failed coup d’état in 1992. Fujimori was an academic and university president who had no political network when he first ran for president. True outsiders are probably more successful in more personalized and fluid political systems, such as the presidential systems in Latin America, than in more institutionalized and established political systems, like the party-dominated parliamentary systems in western Europe.

In reality, almost all successful populists are insider-outsiders: men and women who have never been members of the political elite, i.e., the inner circle of the political regime, but have (strong) connections to them. FPÖ leader Jörg Haider was a protégé of Bruno Kreisky, Austria’s long-serving social democratic chancellor (1970–1983), while long-term Republican senator John McCain catapulted Sarah Palin onto the national stage. Similarly, Berlusconi built his media empire through his special connection with Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party (1976–1993) and premier of Italy (1983–1987). In post-communist eastern Europe most prominent populists of the 1990s had been closely connected to the communist regime—for example, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the late leader of the populist radical right Greater Romania Party (PRM), was a “court poet” of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus‚ escu, while Vladimir Zhirinovski founded the first officially sanctioned “opposition” party in the Soviet Union. Ironically, often it is these connections to the (former) elite that separate the successful populists from the unsuccessful populists.

Finally, there is a small group of insider populists, i.e., populists who come from within the heart of the political elite. Some have held high-ranking positions in mainstream parties before starting a second career as a populist politician. The best example is

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undoubtedly Thaksin Shinawatra, who served twice as vice prime minister before launching his own populist party and becoming prime minister. In other cases populist leaders transform not only themselves, but also their populist party. In Switzerland, Christoph Blocher changed the conservative SVP into the most successful populist radical right party in western Europe, while, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán has pushed the initially libertarian Fidesz toward conservatism first and right-wing populism later.

The boundaries between insider and outsider status become blurred when populist leaders are able to win elections and stay in power for a long period of time. When this occurs, they necessarily become part of the political—and usually also the economic—establishment. There is no better example of this than the case of Chavismo in Venezuela. Fifteen years of governing the “Bolivarian revolution” has led to an almost wholesale elite change and the rise of a new ruling class, the so-called Boliburguesía. This even changed the status of Chávez, who, after more than ten years in power, transformed from a genuine outsider in the 1999 presidential elections to a true insider in the elections of 2013.

Just as the boundaries between insider and outsider are sometimes blurred, the distinction between populist and nonpopulist politician is not always easy to discern. Some famous mainstream politicians have used populist rhetoric from time to time, including Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and U.S. president Ronald Reagan. In fact, commentators tend to use the term insider populism in reference to this particular type of politician. However, neither these politicians nor their parties were truly populist, as populism was not a core feature of their ideology. These insiders merely used populist rhetoric to set themselves apart from other mainstream politicians and (try to) look authentic. Not by chance, mainstream politicians tend to employ populist discourse mostly during election campaigns, while largely ignoring it in government.

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The populist image

Personalization is a general trend in contemporary politics and populism is certainly no exception to this rule. Most of the successful cases of populism involve a strong leader, irrespective of the type of mobilization. But populism is neither defined by nor wedded to a specific type of leader. The stereotypical populist strongman constitutes only a minority of all populist leaders—irrespective of the host ideology of the populist actor. Moreover, the success of populist leaders is less dependent upon a universal list of specific personality characteristics than on a carefully constructed image of vox populi, based on the combination of outsider-status and authenticity.

The attractiveness of the specific image of the voice of the people is linked to the political culture of the society in which the populist leader operates. For example, the stereotypical populist strongman is more likely to be attractive to people in societies with a more traditional and machismo culture, while entrepreneur-populists will probably be attractive in more capitalist and materialist societies. Political culture has a particularly interesting effect on female populist leaders. Obviously, all societies are gendered, but they are not always gendered in the same way. Female populists can succeed in both emancipated and traditional societies, but in different ways. Traditional cultures will favor inherited female (and male) populist leaders, while emancipated societies will (also) be open to self-made female leaders.

The construction of the image of vox populi is also dependent upon the host ideology of the populist leader. For example, it is much easier to combine an entrepreneurial image with neoliberal populism than with socialist populism, while ethnic minorities can more easily become leaders of ethnopopulist than of populist radical right movements. Similarly, female leaders will probably construct a more traditional image in right-wing populist parties than in left-wing populist ones. All this notwithstanding, most

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populist leaders devote so much attention to constructing an image of political outsider in order to hide a long and close relationship to the same elites they so vehemently renounce. Hence, building upon Paul Taggart’s original observation, populism can be thought of as politics for ordinary people by extraordinary leaders who construct ordinary profiles.