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

Populism and Democracy 27
not made its appearance in all political systems. Likewise, politics has
become personalized in all contemporary democracies, but populist leaders
have not emerged in all contemporary democracies. In order to assess the
varying importance of the three above-mentioned political conditions, we
need to analyse whole social systems and elaborate some indicators as to:
(1) how serious the crisis of the structures of political intermediation actually
is;
(2) how significant is the personalization of politics;
(3) how pervasive is the role of the media (which media? owned by whom?)
in political life.
Moreover, we need to provide a global view of these three processes and
their interrelations.
Though one should never explain a complex phenomenon by relying on
a single variable, this kind of temptation is very difficult to resist. Here, we
will yield to it, but with a note of caution. Populism is a phenomenon
bound to appear in almost all democracies. However, in order for populism
to emerge and have a significant impact on the political system and society,
there is one element above all others which must exist, i.e. the presence
of a leader willing and able to exploit existing social conditions of anxiety
and availability. If those social conditions do not exist, no populist force
can emerge. On the other hand, the social conditions may exist, but in the
absence of a political leader capable of exploiting them, no populist experiment
will ensue. Only rarely will a political leader succeed in both tasks:
first, creating and, second, exploiting the social conditions that will allow
him/her to launch a populist challenge at an existing, though weakened,
democratic regime. There are good reasons to believe that most political
systems undergoing an institutional transition will be exposed to populist
challenges. Leaving the subject aside here, although Mastropaolo deals
with it in his chapter, this has certainly been the case of Italy since 1994.
Indeed, the existence of a never-ending institutional transition goes a long
way towards explaining the successful populism of Silvio Berlusconi. It
may also be true that Berlusconi has taken advantage of his ownership of
half the Italian television system and has fully exploited the opportunities
deriving from his mastery of this medium. To be sure, television has most
certainly contributed, as Giampietro Mazzoleni convincingly argues in
this book, to the appearance of a kind of media populism in many European
as well non-European democracies. However, what remains to be explained
is the dominance exercised by Berlusconi over Italian politics for more
than ten years. Since no other media populist-politician has been so successful,
the explanation lies, as I suggested, in the institutional and political
conditions of Italian democracy and in the inability to restructure a
viable party system.