There have been a lot of large-scale protests in 2019, from Paris to Santiago and from Hong Kong to Baghdad people have taken to the streets to protest a wide range of issues. Obviously, the reasons why people decide to protest vary from place to place and depends a lot on specific circumstances but in this week’s blog post I want to propose an explanation as to why there have been so many mass protests this year, namely populist rhetoric.
Populism is a term which gets thrown around frequently but is seldom explained. For the purposes of this blog post the part of populism I want to focus on is the central conflict which for populists is ‘the people’ versus’ the elite’. ‘The elite’ is stereotypically globalist, rich, urban and well educated and out of touch with ‘the people’, and usually consists of mainstream politicians, bankers, journalists and the civil service. ‘The people’ is harder to define and is usually just everyone who isn’t ‘the elite’. There is often a third major force in populist thinking which usually isn’t given a name which I will call ‘the champion’. ‘The Champion’ is the person, group or party which understands and fights for what ‘the people’ really want, and often ‘the champion’ isn’t just the only one which understands ‘the people’ but crucially the only one who can understand ‘the people’. One of the key features to much of populist rhetoric is that relations between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ is inherently antagonistic, after all you can’t be part of both ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ at the same time as these two groups are at least partly defined by their differences from the other.
If this narrative finds hold it’s easy to see why protests would be a popular tool in politics, especially if the champion is defeated at the polls. Consider France, in this example President Emanuel Macron is clearly an elite, and Marine Le Pen is the people’s champion. With the champion defeated in 2017 the people had no other option but to protest when the elite decided to pursue a policy which turned out to be clearly out of touch with the people.
This model of explanation is obviously not applicable universally, for example I think the protests in Hong Kong would have started regardless of the ideology or rhetoric currently in vogue as the issue of autonomy is sufficiently important to warrant protests, and I’m not knowledgeable enough about South American, North African or Middle Eastern politics to be able to discern whether or not populist rhetoric featured in the formation of the protests there. Still, I think rhetoric which casts groups to have inherently antagonistic relations, be that populism, Marxism or ethno-nationalism, makes protests more likely. And protests are not necessarily a bad thing, though they can easily become bloody affairs as history has shown. My point is simply that the last years’ rise in populist rhetoric could have caused some of this year’s many protests.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject, both my hypothesis and the protests themselves. You can debate with me on twitter @ipolecoblog and read last week’s blog post here. If you found this post interesting consider sharing it with a friend and please come back next week for a new blog post.
Written by Karl Johansson, Founder of Ipoleco
Cover Photo by Amine M'Siouri from Pexels
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