One way of understanding how we find ourselves in this political moment is to understand better the ideas that make up populism. What is it that populist politicians say, believe, claim to believe, value, promise, that seems so convincing in the context we are in? At a time when political choices can seem increasingly volatile and polarized, a deeper understanding of which “packages of ideas” move people to action is crucial. And ideologies are just that: the link between ideas and mobilization of any type, whether casting a ballot, taking to the streets, staging a rally, writing a manifesto, or creating a hashtag.

Looking at the ideas that make up populism, and how these hang together as an ideology, can serve as a lens through which to track populism over time: if we can identify these key ideas and how these become more or less prominent – in relation to how they are being used and defined by political parties, movements and leaders – then we can start to tell populism from everything else because we will have a better idea of its boundaries. We can also track how it has evolved in different places and over time, and from what kind of “oxygen” it has benefited to become defining of our political era. But, equally importantly, we can track some of our own transformations as citizens and explain why we have become so susceptible to it.

Why thinking about ideologies helps

There are some clear advantages to treating populism as an ideology, as a set of ideas and the ideals that hang together as a blueprint for political action. The main advantage is that it forces observers to see it as more than a sum of its parts; it gives it some coherence and direction. In a word, it allows us to deal with populism as a political project (outlined by some and acquiesced to by others) rather than just “a development” or a symptom.

Because they help mobilize people, ideologies are more than just political thought: they contain a recommended, normative course of action.

A case of the missing person

What these four cases illustrate is that certain key ideas matter: populism is not just “a version of …” and crucially, that these ideas matter in their relationship to one another. Taken together they are greater than the sum of their parts, and it is that relational logic between them that imparts its dynamics to populist politics. And citizens seem to have become far more responsive to them. Some of the approaches we initially looked at take into account that values ebb and flow, and of course events and developments shape them. But no approach seems to do justice to the new link between citizen demands for directness, immediacy and transparency, what we have called authenticity.

In fact, in most approaches there is only a vague sense of the citizen, or political subject. Analysts have been a little thin on the relational side of populism, and extremely thin on what some might call the “demand side” of populism. Yet, there may be crisis, and there may be discourses, and there may be ideas, but someone has to be in the mood to respond to them.

A populist profile?

Most studies that try to look at populist “voters” focus on demographics, hoping that through a deductive enterprise a better sense of a “populist voter” might emerge. In a Counterpoint pamphlet, for instance, my colleagues and I looked at the characteristics of populist party voters in Europe and tried to draw out correlations between education, or income or employment status, gender, etc, and a propensity to vote for a populist party (Fieschi, Morris & Caballero-Sosa 2012). But the best one can do with such numbers – and this is by no means useless – is to draw correlations between support for a populist party and voters with these characteristics. This can be helpful in terms of thinking about voting behaviour, but in fact it tells us little about the motivations of these voters. This is also because voters seem increasingly diverse: what used to be a mainly male voting base, for example, has dramatically evolved; and voters’ levels of income and life characteristics are more varied than they used to be, as populism has become more successful and captured more voters.

Starting with Jean-Marie Le Pen may seem strange. After all he is no longer leader of the Front National (which is no longer called the Front National), he is an elderly man and his political career is over. And yet, it all starts with Jean-Marie Le Pen. When Le Pen formed the FN the Second World War had been over for less than 30 years. It was 1972 in fact, the last gasp of the immediate postwar era. It was the end of the boom years (the “thirty glorious ones” as the French refer to them) and just one year before the oil shock of 1973, which would mark the end of Europe’s most prosperous era.

The FN would come to provide the bridge between the old extreme right (still tainted by Nazism and fascism) and the new right-wing populism of the twenty-first century. By 2002, Le Pen had made it all the way to the second round of the French presidential elections (narrowly beating Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to second place with 16.86% of the vote – Jospin had scored 16.18%). It took 30 years, but in those three decades Le Pen rewrote the gamebook for challenger parties on the right and shaped contemporary populism. In Le Pen’s formulations and behaviour we can detect the beginnings of a powerful appeal to transparency and to a new form of authentic politics.

The Front national: prototyping contemporary populism

The year 1972 was not Le Pen’s first foray into politics. After a brief stint in the National Assembly (in 1956 as an MP for Pierre Poujade’s Union de Défense des Commerçants et des Artisans (UDCA) – an early populist precursor), Le Pen momentarily faded from view and, in 1962, the new, Fifth Republic swept away the relics of the Fourth and its institutions were kind to no one but its Gaullist architects. The next few years would bear the hallmarks of this deep political transformation: the Algerian war, decolonization, the rise of Gaullism and its struggle to impose order on the French party system. De Gaulle opened up France, but he was a man of his time: government’s role was to rein in chaos.

I grew up in northern Italy in the 1970s and my memories are of an incomprehensible mixture of complete inertia – Nothing. Ever. Changed. – and permanent upheaval. Food was predictable, Sundays were predictable, church was predictable, school was stultifying. But what was also predictable were bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. I remember General Dalla Chiesa coming to dinner and landing by helicopter on the roof of our building (and believe me, there was no helipad up there), surrounded by carabinieri to protect him from the Red Brigades – which he eventually vanquished, only to be murdered along with his young wife by the mafia in Parlermo in 1982. In 1992 it was the turn of Judge Falcone, and then a few short months later, Judge Borsellino was also murdered. And in between, there was the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro. This mix of predictability and, often violent, turmoil, is the backdrop against which contemporary Italian populism arises.

Deep roots

Getting to the roots of Italian populism sometimes feels like a problem of infinite regress. From today’s coalition government between the right-wing populist Lega and the left-wing populist Five Star Movement (M5S), you take a step back to Silvio Berlusconi and the 1990s; which takes you remarkably quickly back to the immediate postwar moment and the “uomo qualunque” movement (“movement of the ordinary man”); which then takes you back to fascism (and its inescapable populist component). At which point someone stops you and says that you really need to go back to the “southern question”. What about 1860 and unification then? Much further back, comes the answer.

First, the so-called southern question and the disparity of wealth between the North of Italy and the poorer South, which became even starker after unification (in the 1860s) as more efficient northern manufacturers and their less efficient southern counterparts came into direct competition, is undoubtedly significant. All current regionalist debates have their origins in this period, and regionalist debates underpin Italian politics; they continue to be an ever-present and structuring set of dynamics.

Second, fascism and its legacy are important. Italian fascism and Mussolini’s regime play a role in the entrenchment of populism on the Italian political landscape.

Three main reasons prompted me to write this book. The first two fall, by and large, into the category of “explanation” or “clarification”. When I first started to become interested in populism, it was a minority sport. I was interested in Thatcherism and wrote an MA thesis about her politics and its place within the British political tradition. I discovered the writings of Stuart Hall on authoritarian populism, and, as a 20 year-old, became enraptured with his forensic capacity to expose the ideological springs of a truly novel political experiment. Hall’s debates with Bob Jessop in the New Left Review were my first, real foray into political analysis that took ideology seriously. It led me to take it so seriously that I became interested in “the stronger stuff”. Thatcher was riveting, but I concluded that, in terms of populism, she was not the Real McCoy. Her resignation coincided with my typing up of the final version of my MA – I typed as quickly as I could as events came to a head, keeping just enough of an eye on the television to make sure she was not doing or saying anything that would blow my little thesis apart. Pre-social media, pre-internet, I could not leave the house for fear of missing someone being pushed down the stairs in Downing Street. As I write in March 2019, it’s funny how history repeats itself, except now I can find out more easily who are the latest casualties, or survivors.

Thatcher was also resigning just as the French Front National (FN) was emerging as a powerful political force, and Europe started to take notice. So, I turned my attention to it and to Jean-Marie Le Pen – the early bubblings of European populism. I was asked relatively often at the time, why I had chosen such a “niche” topic for my PhD. Then, a dissertation on populism was considered highly original, bordering on the quirky. Now, when I reveal my special subject, I am almost met with a yawn. Surely not another populism specialist? So, the first question I want to answer in this volume is why (brushing aside the possibility that I was staggeringly prescient) populism has become such a commonplace feature of our politics.

This book began with a question regarding how puzzled we are by populist politics: we broadly understand its causes, but we still struggle to understand how and why it works so well, and above all, the particular shape it takes. The answer, I argue, is that populist parties have turned one of the most powerful promises of the Enlightenment – and of democracy – against itself. By making the promise of authenticity core to its appeal, it has been able to harness the promises of democracy and subvert them. It is a kind of political jiu-jitsu, in which rather than using its own force against its democratic opponents, populism has turned the opponent’s own force on itself. This hasn’t happened by accident: the nature of political expectations has changed fundamentally under the pressures and the promises of the digital revolution. For those of us living in largely democratic states, authenticity has always been an idea central to our politics, but the transformations ushered in by the digital age have made us more receptive to wild promises of authenticity, of transparency and of accessibility. And so, what was one of representative democracy’s defining ideas has been exploited to usher in the very antithesis of representative democracy.

It is the fact that populism is so closely related to democracy, that it borrows and subverts its most cherished concepts, applies its recipes, and stretches its logic to extremes that makes it such a powerful ideological opponent. Every time you think you have it pinned it down, it struggles free by stunning you with your own references, your own moves.

The dark matter of authenticity

For a number of people, the idea that authenticity should resurface in such a guise is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. And yet populism’s subversive appeal to authenticity seems to have captured the deep tectonic shift that defines this political moment. Authenticity has become both the yardstick by which opposition is judged – a moral yardstick that turns political opponents into amoral, or worse immoral, creatures – but also the defining quality to embody. As G. S. Enli puts it, “it has become a strategy in its own right” (Enli 2016: 133).

On 16 June 2016, a week before the date of the UK’s referendum on the European Union, my phone suddenly flashed with several breaking news alerts: it was early afternoon and the shocking news was that Jo Cox, the young and brilliant MP for Batley and Spen had been shot dead by a man who, according to witnesses, had yelled “This is for Britain!”, “Keep Britain independent!” and “Put Britain first!” A week later, like many others, I made my way to Trafalgar Square for a memorial in her honour. I had a broken ankle and stood well to the side on my crutches. At one point we were asked to join hands, which felt like a very un-British thing to do and somewhat perilous in my case. But the man next to me extended his hand with a smile and so there we were: me wobbly on one crutch, and him providing balance. Although the fabric of the nation had already been frayed by the campaign, and by Jo Cox’s murder, there was at that moment a desire to overcome the divisions that had been made so deep and so glaring by a referendum campaign that had been ugly and brutal – to the point of unleashing murder. It would also really be the last time in which a public conversation took place about the fact that a young MP, a mother of two, was murdered in broad daylight during the referendum campaign. While her name comes up, as it is both fondly remembered and attached to a number of causes, there has been no discussion about it; political violence has been swept under the carpet by blaming the murderer’s mental illness. Yet one wonders whether the acrimony between the two sides (Leave and Remain), the still-born deals, the miscommunication, the sense of a great unravelling of British politics and a shaming of its political landscape for ego, greed, and incompetence can really be entirely disconnected from the death that marked the campaign’s lowest point.

I am putting the finishing touches to this chapter as the negotiations of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union enter their final stage.

When I first started paying attention to Dutch politics it was out of a fascination for its capacity to hold itself together despite deep divisions in society. Indeed, the political story of Dutch society is one of institution-building in the face of the constant threat of fragmentation. Much as the low countries had been physically under threat from the sea and built the devices to protect themselves from rising sea-levels, so were they once in danger of disintegration from religious divisions and developed the institutional pillars to defend and define themselves against the forces that could undermine their unity.

My interest was in the nature of these pillars: how they had emerged and managed to structure a peaceful, well-organized coexistence (despite religious differences) and a form of politics defined by negotiation, compromise and elite governance. The system fragmented in the late 1960s and early 1970s and splintered into many more parties, but the continuation of a political culture based on tolerance, openness and compromise seemed ensured.

The Netherlands offered a paradox for sociologists and political analysts: it was a place where there should have been chaos, but where in fact nothing much happened for a very long time (the quip by the nineteenth-century German intellectual Heinrich Heine was that when something did happen, it was 50 years after it had happened anywhere else in the world); and then, in the mid-twentieth century, the Netherlands became a place where almost everything “happened” before it did anywhere else – drug decriminalization, euthanasia, the regulation of prostitution and relaxed attitudes towards diversity of all types. It looked as though even once the old system of pillarized, orderly politics organized around strong, clear (religiously defined) parties had crumbled, the shadow of a form of bourgeois complacency lingered long enough to make the Dutch untroubled with many other aspects of diversity. Bourgeois satisfaction and elite prudence seemed to have seamlessly mutated into Boho acceptance.

So, the early 2000s came as a bit of a shock: in quick succession Pim Fortuyn (an openly gay, anti-Islam, right-wing politician) rose to prominence using a language that broke with Dutch tolerance and compromise.

The first time I walked into Jean-Marie Le Pen’s office, it was in Brussels. Having spent months trying to secure a meeting with him in Paris, I realized that it would be a lot easier to set this up at the European Parliament – where no one wanted anything to do with him.

Countless letters to the Front National’s then head of press had created a tenuous connection with her: we had moved from “who are you exactly?” (a PhD student studying the FN), to “in principle, yes” (“but not now”), and finally to a relationship, of sorts, in which I donned the mantel of supplicant on a weekly basis and she magnanimously showed increasing amounts of calendar flexibility. We reached the high-point of our calendar courtship when she finally revealed the name and phone number of the woman who handled “le Chef’s” appointments in Brussels and the specific dates on which I was most likely to clinch an interview.

This was summer 1996. I had a studious, academic, detailed knowledge of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his party. And I had scoured countless interviews, watched him on French television and listened to him on French radio. I had read multiple accounts of populism, in Europe and elsewhere (from the nineteenth-century Russians to the emerging Europeans, via the twentieth-century Latin Americans), examined the geography of votes, the historical lineage, the Poujade references and the links to fascism and authoritarianism. And though all of it was crucial, these strands did not manage to come together to explain the increasing amount of traction that the FN exercised over French politics, the French party system and the French, tout-court.

The one thing I had not done was interact with Le Pen. So, I did not know what to expect but I expected something. I expected something to fall into place that would provide me with the insight that would bring the rest together. It took years before that crucial insight finally came into focus.