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108 | Anna Unger
and Southern Europe, and a “zone of complacency” across Western Germany,
Scandinavia, and the Netherlands” (GSDR 2020, 22), while dissatisfaction
has decreased in Eastern Europe significantly over the past decade, with the
exception of Romania (GSDR 2020, 25). The report finds that
[t]he length of the current malaise also explains why this time it has led to a wave of
populism, a wave that began some five years after the onset of the eurozone sovereign
debt crisis. At first, European publics were prepared to give established parties a
chance to address the continent’s mounting economic and migration challenges ...
By the end of the decade, however, electorates had lost patience. (GSDR 2020, 23)
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe,
the first generation of liberal postcommunist elites has been swept aside by the election
to high office of populist politicians and parties, often on a platform of nationalism,
social welfare, and anti-immigration. The concurrence of populism and democratic
satisfaction reminds us, perhaps, that satisfaction with democracy is not the same
as a belief in liberal principles or values - but is as much due to congruence between
popular sentiment and the attitudes expressed by the political class, whatever those
sentiments may be. (GSDR 2020, 25)
b. The rise of populism and the polarisation of politics
The literature of populism has become almost as wide as that of democracy.
It is impossible to summarise how many different definitions and approaches
to this subject co-exist in social sciences nowadays. While some scholars
consider populism as an ideology that steps beyond the classic cleavages of the
economic left-right and the cultural liberal-conservative axes (Mudde 2004,
Canovan 2002), others define it as a political strategy, technic, or discourse
style (Laclau 2005). Moreover, it is also widely discussed whether populism
is only a pathology of democratic politics (Mudde 2004, Finchelstein 2014,
Streeck 2017), or whether it is undemocratic (Mudde 2021, Miller 2016).
The aim of this subsection is not to widen this debate, or to explain the
arguments in detail. Populism greatly varies by time periods and by regions,
and also by its usage, whether as a self-identification of parties and politicians
(as was the case, for example, in the late 1880s and the 1890s in the United
States), or as a label given by others. Consequently, instead of discussing
the many different streams of debates about populism, I only sum up here
the most recent studies about the rise and influence of populist parties in
contemporary European politics, while we shall return to the problem of
definition later, in the third part of this chapter.
In their recent analysis, Paul Taggart and Andre L. P. Pirro claim that
populism is widely present in Europe — however, this populism takes not one