Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

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only thing that is said to ‘count’ (as the rhetoric of the Labour party in
contemporary Britain shows) is resolving the practical, immediate and usually
local problems of the ‘man in the street’ such as schools, jobs and crime.
Politics is characterized, even by many politicians themselves, as something
which most ordinary people naturally prefer to be involved in as little as
possible. It is held that they have better things to do, such as attending to
their personal and professional lives, and that politics should facilitate them
to do this with minimal interference.
All the above is of course fuel to the fire for the populist. And, as the evidence
in this volume clearly demonstrates, the twenty-first century provides
ample and ever-increasing opportunities for populist actors in Western
Europe seeking to portray the homogeneous and virtuous people’s rights,
values, prosperity, identity, voice and sovereignty as being under threat
from a series of elites and dangerous ‘others’. National political elites can
easily be depicted as having ‘sold the people out’ to an unelected (and
uncontrollable) supranational oligarchy in Brussels and to the rapacious
financial elites of multinational corporations. The same elites and immigrants
can be blamed for the scaling down of the Welfare State, as a result of
which the people are now ‘less protected’ and the state and political parties
can thus be accused of having ‘abandoned’ the people. Moreover, the community,
the safe place where the people once lived in harmony, can be characterized
as under attack from all sides – from above by the elites and from
below by a series of ‘others’. Indeed, in this way, ‘the community’, like
Taggart’s ‘heartland’, becomes, as Zygmunt Bauman (2001: 3) says, ‘another
name for paradise lost’ − a place that we long to return to because ‘we miss
security, a quality crucial to a happy life, but one which the world we inhabit
is ever less able to offer and ever more reluctant to promise’ (Bauman, 2001:
145). Populists, by contrast, are not reluctant to promise. They promise security.
They promise prosperity. They promise identity. They promise to return
the sceptre of democracy to its rightful owner. They promise to make the
people, once more, masters in their own homes, in the widest sense of the
term.
Western Europe: a fertile terrain for populism
We believe that the analyses offered in this book point to the importance,
in particular, of four structural factors in explaining the rise and
success of populism: the features of specific party systems (and the
detachment between voters and parties which has developed in contemporary
Western Europe within such systems); the changing logic and
work practices of Western media; the politicization of the socio-cultural
dimension (especially immigration); and, finally, economic changes
(especially due to globalization).