Abstract

»In history and social sciences, populism is defined as a style of politics that accentuates ›common sense‹, while denying the ruling elites the capability or even the willingness to defend public interests. Populism is therefore a form of political rhetoric that is characterized by polarization, personalization, moralizing, and usually also by anti-intellectualism. Populist movements maintain that they alone represent the interests of the ordinary person. They use existing clichés, stereotypes, and prejudices, and they prefer to work with subjects that are suitable for stirring up strong emotions among citizens. Thus, the agitation of populists frequently works with simplicity and with presumably easy solutions, referring to existing needs of major parts of society. Simple but convincing slogans serve the goal of winning attention and, if possible, of achieving power. Simultaneously, populists accuse their political adversaries of not recognizing problems and of having lost sight of the good of the people. They stress the benefits of direct democracy and reject representative forms of government, while not having a value system and an ideology of their own, but rather being oriented toward day-to-day political issues in a highly opportunistic way.

The American political scientist Marc F. Plattner of the National Endowment for Democracy therefore views populism as a majority-oriented understanding of democracy beyond liberalism and constitutionalism:

›Populists want what they take to be the will of the majority—often as channeled through a charismatic populist leader—to prevail, and to do so with as little hindrance or delay as possible. For this reason, they have little patience with liberalism’s emphasis on procedural niceties and protections for individual rights‹.

Currently in Europe, right-wing movements are the dominant factor of populism. However, leftist parties, by applying pacifist, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalist argumentation, can also show typical characteristics of populism. In contrast to right-wing populism, which usually tends to support the exclusion of certain individuals or groups from society, leftist populism is almost always aimed at the inclusion of underprivileged social elements by increasing participation and redistribution.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, however, are usually considered as ›antitheses‹ of any form of populism. Their soberness and pragmatism are distinctly different from the behavior of those politicians who, with the assistance of the ever-present media, strive for the great stage. They appear to be shy and seem to prefer working in silence over the spotlight of television cameras—away from the public eye. In fact, neither of them was born for politics: the physicist Angela Merkel was first pulled into the laboratories of scientific research, while the legal scholar and economist Romano Prodi started his career in the lecture halls of a university. Even after finding their way into politics, pompous public appearances were anything but their first choice. As politicians, therefore, they were rather atypical, indeed unusable—this was at least first said about Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, both Merkel and Prodi ventured surprisingly successfully to step into politics and, due to their personal qualities, were both surrounded with the nimbus of being anti-populist, indeed embodiments of the ›antithesis of populism‹—suitable for furnishing politics with a greater degree of well-founded values and, above all, greater credibility.

But are these characterizations correct? Is it not true that all democratic politicians, at least to a certain degree, must also be ›populists‹? And how do Merkel and Prodi fit into the pattern of ›anti-populism‹, which has been attributed to them so often?«

(Introduction, pp. 217 f.)