180 CHAPTER 8
The second key policy position commonly associated with national populism is a resistance to the influence of intergovernmental and supranational bodies, rooted in a deep scepticism towards internationalism (see p. 139). Populist anti-internationalism has two main sources, related, respectively, to national sovereignty and national identity. By insisting on unswerving respect for national sovereignty, populists seek to counter the influence of global elites and other transnational forces, ensuring, in the process, that political control rests firmly in the hands of the nation. Through their emphasis on national identity, populists have aimed to strengthen the nation and, in particular, resist the advance of cosmopolitanism (see p. 139). Populist anti-internationalism has been most apparent in Europe, where its principal target has been the European Union. This has been expressed through growing scepticism about the EU’s founding goal of building ‘an ever closer union’. For example, the Visegrad Four group (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), together with other like-minded states, including Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy, have backed the idea of a much looser ‘Europe of sovereign nations’. The ‘Leave’ victory in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum, which set the country on a course to exit the EU, which was carried out in 2020, is sometimes seen as a manifestation of national populism. However, Brexit is better interpreted as a product of a combination of non-populist and populist forces. The former were articulated by the mainly Conservative official ‘Vote Leave’ campaign (even though its most prominent figure, Boris Johnson, later to become Conservative leader and prime minister, is widely classified as a populist), which focused primarily on economic arguments against EU membership. The latter were largely expressed by the unofficial ‘Leave.UK’ campaign, which, closely linked to the UK Independence Party and its then-leader, Nigel Farage, made more of immigration-related issues. Authoritarian populism Juan Perón’s dictatorial rule in Argentina is usually seen as the classic example of authoritarian populism, defined, as it was, by an emphasis on obedience, order and national unity. Modern right-wing populists nevertheless typically embrace a form of authoritarianism that stops short of outright dictatorship. In this context, the link between populism and authoritarianism is rooted in a particular style of leadership. This leadership style is based on the fact that, despite their veneration of the people, populists rarely hold that the people can and do speak for themselves. Leadership, usually in the form of a single dominant figure, is therefore needed both to give the people a voice and to awaken them to their ‘real’ interests. Strictly speaking, populist leaders do not portray themselves as representatives of the people, for this would imply speaking for, or on behalf of, the people, as a separate, and perhaps superior, entity. Rather, populist leaders emphasize their affinity with the people, even sometimes casting themselves as an integral part of the people. In this light, the role of the populist leader is, in effect, to create or embody the people. The practical implication of this is to widen the leader’s realm of unconstrained action, in part by eroding respect for institutions that mediate between the leader and people, such as parliaments and regional and local assemblies. In its most advanced form, authoritarian populism has contributed to the emergence of the wider phenomenon of ‘strongman’ politics, exemplified by figures such as Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte (although the gendered term is misleading when applied to populist leaders, as examples like Evita Peron, Marine Le Pen (see p. 182), Sarah Palin and Pauline Hanson demonstrate).
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