As anyone who has visited Budapest over the past few decades knows, the best way to get from Liszt Ferenc Airport to a hotel in downtown Budapest is by minibus. Unless, that is, you are rich or a VIP, in which case you would take an overpriced taxi or be provided with a limousine. The road all minibuses take is an ordinary thoroughfare through some decrepit, Stalinist-era city quarters, gradually moving into Üllöi Street with its increasingly beautiful nineteenth-century bourgeois edifices, ultimately revealing the enormous charm of this Austro-Hungarian pearl of a city.

The last time I visited, in mid-April 2018, I noticed something I had not seen in my earlier visits to Budapest. Every 100 meters or so, there were gigantic street-side billboards, each depicting two men. One man – older – was always the same on all billboards. The other – younger – man varied from one billboard to another. But the variations were limited: There were just two or three men, whose faces alternated between each billboard. Although I could not understand the huge text on the billboard (how many non-Hungarians speak Hungarian? I don’t), I quickly realized that they were remnants from Hungary’s recent electoral campaign. The election had taken place some ten days before, and the billboards hadn’t yet been removed. Perhaps they were left up on purpose.

I did not recognize the faces of the middle-aged men, but the older constant character is very well known. His name is George Soros – American billionaire of Hungarian-Jewish origin, financial dealer on a global scale and global philanthropist, too. To make it clear, he was not on the ballot box. In a Photoshopped embrace with the opposition party leaders, he symbolized everything evil and dangerous according to Viktor Orbán’s incumbent Fidesz party: cosmopolitanism, “anti-Hungarism” (whatever that might mean) and, above all, a secret plan to import millions of Muslims to Hungary. Billboards were signed with the logo of Fidesz. And the billboards, along with all the other elements of Orbán’s partisan propaganda, worked. Orbán’s party won nearly 48 percent of the vote, giving it nearly 67 percent of seats in Hungary’s unicameral parliament.

After I settled in my nice hotel in a lively street just a block from the Danube, I met my younger friends, two socio-legal scholars working at a university in Budapest, for dinner. We had known each other from their earlier doctoral research years, when I was their mentor/teacher/friend at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. The dinner – including an obligatory, delicious fish soup – had all the promise of a joyful, carefree conversation among friends, including scholarly matters but also the usual gossip: who did what, who married whom, who split up with whom, and so forth. But the joy of the evening was only temporary.

My ex-students, now my friends, had good reason to be concerned about their fates. Their university – the Central European University (CEU), an elite, international, state-of-the-art higher education institution that attracted the very best professors and students from all over the world – was in big trouble, and my friends’ professional futures were uncertain. First established in 1991, the university was founded and initially funded by the Orbán government’s Public Enemy No. 1. Yes, you guessed it: George Soros. And so Orbán and his people were doing everything they could to banish the university from Hungary’s patriotic, Christian soil. The pretext for this could be found in a law on foreign universities passed in April 2017, which was designed specifically to target the CEU. Among other things, the law required foreign universities to have a campus not only in Hungary but also in their home country, which CEU didn’t have. CEU officials complied with the terms of the new law by establishing academic programs in New York State. But the Hungarian government refused to sign an agreement, which left CEU deprived of a legal basis to continue to operate normally in Budapest.

Eventually, the university was “evacuated” to Vienna in 2019. One of my dinner companions, a woman, later moved to a good university in the UK; another, a man, continued to work in the CEU, but no longer in Budapest. (In a significant postscript, in 2020, the Hungarian government signed an agreement with the Shanghai-based Fudan University to set up a new campus in Budapest.)

And so, the billboard images and the fates of my friends came together through one link: the figure of George Soros.

There was another story related to my airport-to-city transfer that I was told that night at dinner. A “while we are talking about billboards…” type of segue, but this time not in connection with George Soros.

Founded as early as 1989, a Spanish-Hungarian company called ESMA became the leading outdoor advertiser in Hungary. It was big on what economists call “rent seeking” – in this case, state advertisements. But ESMA had a major defect in Orbán’s eyes: The company was close to his chief political rival, the Socialist Party (MSZP). In fact, it was due to ESMA’s proximity to that party – MSZP was the main ruling coalition partner between 2002 and 2010 – that the company was doing really well. However, the combination of its huge profits and “wrong” political colors made it a vulnerable target for a predatory takeover by Orbán’s clique. Two major bids by Orbán’s main oligarch and economic mastermind, Lajos Simicska, were refused. The second bid, in 2012, belonged to the category of offers you cannot refuse – and yet, despite enduring punitive tax controls in its corporate offices, ESMA had the temerity to resist. Soon after, the Hungarian parliament (safely controlled by a Fidesz majority) prohibited all advertising on sidewalks within five meters off the road. It was necessitated by road safety, you see. There was one little problem, though – the rule would have affected some of Simicska’s companies too, including MAHIR, which also owned advertising boards. But this unpleasant effect was quickly eliminated by way of a simple legal exemption for MAHIR. The legislative change meant that ESMA, of course, lost almost all its value overnight. The company once brought in fantastic profits, but in the first year after the legislation was passed, ESMA suffered losses of more than 209 million HUF (EUR 627,000). After a few years of agony, the company was sold in April 2015 to István Garancsi, one of Hungary’s richest citizens and Orbán’s close friend.

And the billboards, what about the billboards? you might ask. The answer is nothing. The five-meter regulation was repealed in July 2015, immediately after the billboards changed hands. The government discovered that road safety was not such a big problem after all. In fact, a new rationale for roadside billboards was found – billboards are of importance in providing information to the people. It is no wonder that under Garancsi’s leadership, the company could again operate at full capacity. In the first year that ESMA was in Garancsi’s hands, it returned a handsome 117 million HUF in profit (EUR 351,000). And those very billboards that I had seen when transferring from the airport to the city were offered to Fidesz at a 95 percent discount.Footnote ¹

*

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is one example of a new family of political systems often branded as “populist” – and their numbers are rising. They include Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński (the party leader, not head of state or even prime minister, both of whom are under his command), the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, and many others. This list is nonexhaustive, and scholars disagree over which cases to include. All share some common characteristics, already hinted at in the account of Hungary just given. They are ruled by leaders who use aggressive language about their opponents, and often define an “enemy” (George Soros, Muslims, the liberal left, Jews, atheists, etc.) to demonize. The narratives they develop often draw on conspiracy theories: There are invidious “plans” to harm the people, but these plans are fortunately exposed by the Leader. The discourse used by leaders often deploys familiar tropes that bring it close to fascism: anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, antipathy to rationalism and Enlightenment, xenophobia.

They all have a charismatic leader personifying the regime, and often the name given to the regime carries the name of the Leader. But even if it does not, even if the Leader is not “charismatic” in the conventional sense of the word (attractive, eloquent, able to excite crowds, subject of popular adulation, etc.), indeed even if the Leader is quite ordinary (as is the case of Jarosław Kaczyński), nevertheless he (and very occasionally she, as was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina) is viewed by their proponents as absolutely indispensable for the success of the system: There is no feasible alternative to him or her. As a result, these political systems are highly personalized: There is no regular procedure for replacing this particular person with another. (Occasionally, they appear out of nowhere and become suddenly popular thanks to a brilliant “performance,” which the electorate turned into audience enjoys. Orbán became well known after his speech in Budapest in 1989 at the reburial of national heroes of the 1956 uprising; the political career of Chávez was initiated by his appearance on television in the aftermath of a failed coup which…he actually had launched.)

In addition to their use of exclusionary discourse and charismatic leadership, those regimes are in many ways “anti-institutional.” The institutional tool kit of representative democracy, inherited from their predecessors, is respected only insofar as it suits the new ruling elite. If it does not – it is disposed of without regret. Sometimes formal constitutional rules are changed, and sometimes (when populists do not hold the power to change the constitution) they remain unchanged – and unused. Formal institutions are viewed by populists as irritants, unnecessarily throwing obstacles on the path of implementing the leadership’s will (Chapter 2, below). Populists do not like being straitjacketed by formal rules and institutions: They are impatient and practice “instantaneous” democracy,Footnote ² in which political will is smoothly and quickly transformed into binding policy or new laws – as was the case of Hungary’s laws banning roadside advertising.

Populists do not like formal institutions, but they are not averse to using the law whenever it suits them – including to reward their cronies and disadvantage their opponents. “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law” – this (in)famous maxim by Peru’s General Óscar Benavides is a nice encapsulation of what has become known as “discriminatory legalism.”Footnote ³ While the law may provide a handy hammer with which to hit your opponent’s head, law enforcers in populist systems look the other way when a Leader and his acolytes obviously break the law.

The author of these words has been prosecuted in Poland in three separate defamation cases by its populist rulers (twice by the state TV [TVP] and once by the ruling party, PiS). I was SLAPPed, to use an acronym coined by international NGOs to mean Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. The slap has so far not been too harsh, and gave me the privilege of practicing, for once, what I had preached for much of my life. As of the time of the writing, all three cases are still pending at different stages of progression through the court system. But while I could see, courtesy of PiS and TVP, the inner workings of a vindictive state, there hasn’t been even a preliminary investigation into PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński’s active participation in what appear to be clearly corrupt real estate dealings, which were leaked to, and announced by, opposition media. He is heard on tapes deliberating with his acolytes (including the PiS-nominated boss of the major state-run bank) about a multimillion-dollar construction in the center of Warsaw, with every regulatory concession and easy credit so long as PiS is in power. (“Twin Towers”: Think of Petronas building in Kuala Lumpur, but with an East European solidity.) It would support the party for rainy days. He even colluded with his collaborators about how to trick an Austrian developer by not paying him for his two years’ worth of work on the project. When the desperate Austrian came to Kaczyński’s office to claim his money, the party leader cheerfully suggested that the developer sue him in a court of law. (Kaczyński himself has not denied the authenticity of these tapes, and the facts of these dealings.)

The case of the Hungarian billboards points to yet another common characteristic. Each of these “populist” regimes relies on a thoroughly corrupt symbiosis of political power with the economy: Businesses operate thanks to government largesse (privileges in public procurement, special taxes, government contracts – all devices that justify the economist [and former liberal politician] Bálint Magyar calling today’s Hungary “a mafia state”) while the rulers, for their part, benefit from these businesses’ reciprocal generosity. Perhaps the least shocking example of this is the practice of acquiring very costly advertisements in pro-government periodicals, even if the expense is not warranted by the circulation of those titles. State advertisements are omitted from weeklies critical of the government, no matter how wide their circulation. Indeed, the wider, the worse. In Poland, for example, the two political weeklies with the highest circulation, 50 percent of readers in that segment, receive the grand total of 0.5 percent of the entire budget given by Poland’s state enterprises for ads in print media. It goes without saying that these weeklies are highly critical of PiS.Footnote ⁴ Of course, some degree of corruption exists everywhere, including in unimpeachable liberal democracies – but this type of cozy relationship between politics and business occurs to an extreme that is distinctive of populist regimes.

One may think that all these features are indicative of traditional authoritarianism. Aggressive language and paranoid narratives, a charismatic leader and a cult of personality, a cavalier attitude to formal institutions and to the rule of law, structural corruption…but there is a difference. All the populist regimes discussed in this book involve rulers emerging from (by and large) free and (by and large) fair elections. (The “by and large” clause is necessary because over time, elections tend to be less free and less fair if these rulers are able to entrench themselves for consecutive terms.)

So, in contrast to good old authoritarian tyrants (tanks on the streets, thousands of political prisoners, general violence and fear), populist regimes respect at least one civil right of their citizens: that of participating in free, fair, and regular elections. Populists come to their first term of office by offering policies that are accepted by the majority (and if not the majority, at least by the largest plurality). They stay in power because their mandate is reconfirmed by the electorate. Populists are unlikely to fundamentally abolish free and fair elections because their whole legitimacy relies upon the claim to represent the People. To achieve reelection, they want to be liked by people. Hence, much of what populist regimes do between elections can be understood in terms of maximizing their chances of reelection, that is, their popularity. And that is what makes them “populist” in an ordinary, intuitive sense of the word.

Of course, there is a degree of exaggeration in the last point. Populists in power do many other things, in addition to endearing themselves to the electorates. They cheat and deceive the population, often through state-run propaganda machines. They conduct non-transparent dealings and, in the process, break the law. They corrupt some businesses and discriminate against others. They buy docile judges and prosecute independent ones. Most significantly, they change the rules of the electoral game in order to reach a result that is optimal for them, including by controlling electoral officials. Irrespective of whether these activities increase the genuine popularity of populists, each targets reelection. We must (and we shall, in this book) be realistic in our perception of populist strategies. And we must always keep in mind that actions speak louder than words, and that it is more important to see what populists do than what they say. Which, of course, applies to all politicians, populist or non-populist alike.

And yet, we may justifiably say that leaders such as Orbán, Duterte or Bolsonaro are liked by large segments of their respective populations, in ways that we cannot say the same about, for instance, Kim Jong-un of North Korea or Bashar al-Assad of Syria – if only for the simple reason that there is no way we can measure the popularity of politicians in North Korea or Syria. Many policies adopted by Orbán, Duterte, or Bolsonaro – but not by Kim Jong-un or Bashar al-Assad – are carefully designed and calibrated to elicit actual support from the people, rather than the forced enthusiasm of masses gathered at propagandist rallies. Social welfare and tax policies are meant to generate support from the largest number of voters possible, as is beefing up national pride through a “historical policy” that exaggerates the nation’s past virtues and minimizes its past misdeeds, and similarly, by disadvantaging unpopular minorities and hitting hard at unpopular would-be migrants…The conscious pursuit of popularity, reflected also in an obsession with public opinion polls, combined with an electoral pedigree, is what renders populist regimes fundamentally distinct from, and not merely different by degree, “traditional” authoritarianisms or despotisms. This is what makes them populist, and what renders their relationship to democracy so problematic and ambiguous.

Populists claim to be democrats – in fact, they insist that they are even more democratic than the much-maligned “liberal democracy” they reject. What they are building now, they say, is a better democratic system – an “illiberal democracy” – which is a concept coined years ago by Fareed Zakharia as a pejorative term,Footnote ⁵ but gladly adopted by Viktor Orbán, among others, not with apologies but with pride. In a speech in 2018, when he renewed his own 2014 endorsement of “illiberal democracy,” Orbán derided liberal democracy as strong on liberalism, but weak on democracy: “liberal democracy has undergone a transformation…into liberal non-democracy. The situation in the West is that there is liberalism, but there is no democracy.”Footnote ⁶ And even some anti-populist scholars who depict democratic deficits in the existing liberal democracies adopt this perspective. “The populist surge is an illiberal democratic response to decades of undemocratic liberal policies” – says Cas Mudde, a leading expert in radical and extremist movements.Footnote ⁷

An illiberal but democratic response…but what sort of democracy do you have if there is no respect for academic freedom, as the CEU example shows? Or freedom to criticize the government? Or checks and balances that prevent the accumulation of all powers in the hands of one person? Or the rule of law, which makes it possible for people to be assured that their grievances will be fairly adjudicated by an independent court? Is it a variant of democracy, or rather deformation of democracy – to the point at which the absence of the separation of powers and of the rule of law depletes the system of all the reasons why democracy is such a valued ideal in the first place?

So perhaps the formula adopted by Italian scholar Nadia Urbinati, professor at Columbia University in New York, which holds that populism uses democratic procedures for non-democratic purposes, better captures the uneasy relationship between populism and democracy?Footnote ⁸ Some democratic procedures, such as free elections, are used for many non-democratic purposes, such as the political exclusion of some groups from their common polity. It is true that the initial success of populist movements is a good symptom of democratic deficits of their predecessors (“a mirror in which democracy can contemplate itself”),Footnote ⁹ and that often their diagnosis of democratic deficits of liberal democrats in power is incisive and warranted – but when they are elected into power, the cure is often worse than the disease.

This, at least, will be argued in this book. The steady erosion of democracy in the world over the past two decades is mainly due to populist regimes with weak democratic practices but with an unquestionable electoral pedigree. About two-thirds of all episodes of democratic decline were overseen by democratically elected incumbents, not by military putschists.Footnote ¹⁰ These incumbents have employed a number of different strategies causing democratic erosion, including restricting media and civil society organizations, sidelining the opposition, and undermining the autonomy of electoral officials.

In the past ten years, the decline of democracy worldwide has been continuous and steep. In 2020, the number of countries that (according to V-Dem Institute of Gothenburg – one of the leading research centers on democracy in the world) were in democratic decline was twenty-five (home to 34 percent of the world’s population), while the number of democratizing countries dropped by almost half to sixteen countries (home to a mere 4 percent of the global population). Between 2010 and 2020, the number of liberal democracies diminished from forty-one to thirty-two, with a population share of just 14 percent. The same think tank, when creating the figure of the “average global citizen,” estimated that in 2020 the level of democracy enjoyed by such a statistical character was down to levels last found around 1990.Footnote ¹¹

And then along came the pandemic.

*

A word about definition: As a starting point, I adopt a working, naïve understanding: I will consider as populist those politicians, parties, and programs usually dubbed populist. (In scholarly jargon, this is a “nominalist” definition.) No prize for originality but a premium for uncomplicatedness, I hope. My main suspects in this story will be, primarily, Poland, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Brazil (see the Annex, with an important caveat regarding Venezuela). They are countries run by populists who came to power in a (more-or-less) fair and free election, and use the power to consolidate their rule, and in the process try to be liked rather than feared. On the democratic border, they are flanked by genuine liberal democracies, with checks and balances, maintenance of fairness in elections that leads to alternation in power and judicial independence. On the authoritarian side, they are bordered by states in which elections are a meaningless ritual, either because the outcome is predetermined or inconsequential, with a high degree of cruel repression, and utter disregard for what citizens really think and want. The six I have just listed are not the only countries that belong in the category (what about Turkey, South Africa, Trump’s United States, Johnson’s United Kingdom?), but any such taxonomy and selection is always arbitrary to some extent. Consideration of these politicians and parties when they have gained power, and when their programs become official programs of their state, will help reveal the general traits of today’s populism in power.

But what is populism a characteristic of?

If one considers the current scholarly literature on populism, one can note a fundamental divide between those who locate populism primarily in a politician’s discourse (rhetoric, narrative, ideology, etc.), and those who see it in the realm of institutions (or institutionally structured political strategies). The former understanding, which is dominant in the political sciences, and especially in political theory, refers to the fundamentally anti-pluralist rhetoric employed by populist rulers or populist movements who assume the role of true representatives of or the real identity of the people. As Jan-Werner Müller observed, the “claim to exclusive moral representation of the real or authentic people is at the core of populism.”Footnote ¹² Populists, Müller added, attempt “to speak in the name of the people as a whole” and “to morally de-legitimate all those who in turn contest that claim (which is to say: those who contest their involuntary inclusion in a ‘We the People’; such resisters to populism are effectively saying: ‘not in our name’).”Footnote ¹³

Müller’s understanding of populism as a particular type of rhetoric, an understanding he first firmly established in his enormously influential book on populism, which has become canonical in current discussions,Footnote ¹⁴ has influenced a large number of outstanding scholars. For Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “populism is conceived of as a moral discourse, which by pitting ‘the pure people’ against ‘the corrupt elite’ defends the idea that popular sovereignty should be respected by all means.”Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, for Bart Bonikowski, populism is “a form of political discourse” that can be best “measure[d]…at the level of political speeches, or even speech elements.”Footnote ¹⁶ In a more recent and very important article, Jane Mansbridge and Stephen Macedo conceive of populism as a political discourse in which “the people” are “in a morally charged battle against the elites.”Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, the common conceptual core of populism that they identify is discursive in nature – it comprises anti-elitist tropes that have a moralistic tinge.

But I doubt whether a purely “discursive” account, without more, is sufficiently determinate to distinguish populist from non-populist politicians and governments: Perhaps it focuses too much on what populists say as opposed to what they do. As Nadia Urbinati noted, in short passage which I am tempted to adopt as my motto in this book:

This is not to deny the importance for populist politics of a specific discourse. Discourse matters a great deal, and as we shall see in this book, populist discourse carries distinctive characteristics, with its own style of demagoguery, easy simplifications, occasional paranoia, targeting of enemies, unattainable promises, aggression, wild exaggerations, and the like (Chapter 5, below). But to fully hinge the characterization of pluralism on rhetoric, narratives or discourse is risky: Politicians often use their speech in strategic or deceptive ways. Their language serves their purposes, and analysts of populism do not have to take it at face value.

As a result, the discursive account, if meant as a defining trait of populism, captures too much and too little at the same time. In other words, it risks being both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. It may be over-inclusive (i.e., capture too much): The discursive criterion is unlikely to provide a sharp distinction between populists and perfectly unimpeachable democrats who, in a pluralist democracy, often (though not always) claim that they have a better grasp of the true common interests of their community than their opponents. Such claims are a common staple of democratic politics, and making them does not immediately taint a politician or a party as “populist.” (Self-doubt and skepticism about the value of one’s own diagnosis of social ills, and about the usefulness of proposed remedies, are unlikely qualifications for a successful democratic politician.) Especially in democracies where ideologically determinate political parties have declined in importance, as is the case today, politicians increasingly appeal to a broadly understood public good rather than to the sectoral interests of this or that constituency. This does not necessarily render them “populist”; rather, it may show them to be nonsectarian and non-self-interested (at least, in their rhetoric), for which they should be congratulated rather than reprimanded. As Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugarič in their recent book correctly observe, “Casting yourself as the candidate of the people against the elites isn’t distinctively populist.”Footnote ¹⁹

On the other hand, the discursive definition may also be under-inclusive (capture too little). Populists such as Kaczyński, Orbán, or Duterte do not necessarily say “we and only we are the people,”Footnote ²⁰ and that those who disagree with them are beyond the pale of the nation. Rather, they may characterize and try to delegitimize their opponents by presenting them as corrupt, mistaken, treacherous, in the service of foreign powers, and the like. (And, as Tushnet and Bugarič remind us, for all we know they may be right: “Sometimes the opposition is indeed disloyal.”)Footnote ²¹ Such grandiose declarations that “We are the people” are rare in a literal form, and more often than not are interpretations placed on populists’ statements by analysts unfavorable to them. Hence, to hinge our understanding of populism on making anti-pluralist claims is to hook it on to the shifting sands of public rhetoric.

So, an alternative understanding of populism identifies it with actions, which usually speak louder than words. This sense of populism is different from the discursive approach because it views populism not as an ideology but rather as a form of political organization reflected in institutional structures. Of course, it overlaps with the discursive understanding in that it is, among other things, connected with anti-pluralism, or more specifically, hostility to institutional pluralism. As shown in this book, populists typically try to build bridges to the “real” people, above the heads of intermediary institutions that mediate between the people and the exercise of power in a well-ordered constitutional democracy (Chapter 2, below). They dislike and disparage these institutions even if they pay lip service to them, but in the process, denude them of the reasons that underlie the creation of these institutions in the first place. They hollow them out through various devices such as capture, erosion, duplication and so forth. Electoral political conduct is usually of a plebiscitary character (either yes or no to the incumbents), aimed at translating the will of a mythical, pre-political people into political action. Once elected, populists try to bypass all forms of intermediation.

Perhaps the most eloquent student of institutional populism is a professor of New York University Law School, Samuel Issacharoff. who has long argued that populism marks a departure from the central tenets of democratic governance, in particular “by using the power of incumbency to thwart institutional divisions of authority and by forcing increased domains of state decisionmaking into the hands of unilateral executive authority.”Footnote ²² In his yet-to-be-published book (at the time of writing these words), Issacharoff will provide a detailed institutional analysis of populism (and anti-populist remedies) aimed at showing the deep anti-institutional animus of populists aimed at (inter alia) privileging “elections over mandates,” the use of unconstrained executive power, and repudiation of institutional accommodation of societal divisions.Footnote ²³ As one can see, the main institutional aspect of populism under this account is a frontal assault upon the separation of powers. This populist resistance to any dispersal or limitation on power is joined with radical majoritarianism, under which all institutions must reflect and express the will of the current majority, which in a pars pro toto way is taken to be the will of the entire polity. Hence the crucial significance of both the ritual of elections that generate or entrench the political majority and the principled antipathy to any counter-majoritarian institutions and procedures.

It is no coincidence that the institutional approach is favored by constitutional scholars rather than political theorists; disciplinary foci (if not déformations professionnelles) inform, to a large degree, the approach taken. This is often highlighted by the use of adjectives like “institutional” or “constitutional” in conjunction with “populism.” But it is not only disciplinary specialization that inclines some scholars to adopt an institutional rather than discursive perspective. It is also largely driven by the subject matter of their analysis. Observers of populist movements that merely attempt to win power, so far unsuccessfully, will necessarily be inclined to focus on discourse or rhetoric because, to put it crudely, this is all there is. In contrast, scholars who describe and analyze “actually existing populism” (a formula here deliberately parroting what used to be known as “actually existing socialism,” a.k.a. the Soviet bloc) have lots of material related to institutional reform (or deformation, depending on your perspective) to describe populism in terms of unconstrained majoritarianism and assaults upon the separation of powers.

But the discursive/institutional divide is too crude a device to adequately reflect the landscape of contemporary approaches to populism. Many commentators attempt to find a synthesis and merge discursive accounts with institutional versions. One of the leading students of constitutional authoritarianism and populism, Kim Lane Scheppele, in one of her numerous contributions on the subject, analyzed populism as a form of political strategy for autocrats, by drawing on Hungary as an example.Footnote ²⁴ In her view, the Orbán regime’s ethno-nationalist majoritarian philosophy is a rhetorical gambit, one that is parasitic on a legitimate academic and popular discourse about liberal constitutionalism, that exploits its tensions in order to blunt opposition to institutional changes that centralize power and erode constitutional constraints. Her view of populism therefore has a discursive tinge, but it is still primarily strategic and focused on institutional control. It is just that the most sophisticated populists, “in places that value intellectualism,” engage in a skillful distortion of liberal constitutional values by actively intervening in elite and popular discourses: They “mirror and mimic the language of constitutional liberalism in order to undermine it in practice.”Footnote ²⁵

*

“Mirror, mimic, undermine.” This is not a pretty picture. Populists feed on, and further contribute to, a highly moralized and negative polarization; a division of the polity into Us and Them. It is moralized because “They” are evil, not just mistaken, and it is negative, because “We” hate “Them” more than we love “Ours.” We are on the side of angels, and They are the mortal enemy of Us, of the real people, working hard for a living. This Manichean story – which I will describe in some detail in Chapter 5 – is transposed onto the institutions: They all should, uniformly, serve Us (remember, the real, decent people, with children and stuff); hence any checks and balances, separation of powers and independent institutions such as courts (Chapter 4) only upset the achievement of justice. When populist leaders can, they will write this institutional homogeneity into their constitutions (Chapter 3); when they cannot, they will flout formal constitutional separation of powers (Chapter 2).

The pandemic – like a war or any natural calamity – is a powerful reality check brought to this picture (Chapter 6). In the pandemic, as in a war, the unified people stand by their leaders, mustering all the self-discipline they can afford, postponing their disagreements to better days. But the pandemic – like a war – also tests the leadership. And in the face of the disaster that Covid-19 brought to the world, the test was not passed well by populist leaders. Not with high distinction, at least. This is a generous statement. They have by and large failed miserably – this would be a more realistic assessment. What could have been a God-given opportunity to show the superiority of a system of an omni-powerful and wildly popular Leader over slow and wavering liberal democracies turned into a picture of incompetence, trivialization of the danger, disdain for scientific evidence, and chaotic indecisiveness of populist elites.

The microscopic foe, 600 times smaller than a grain of salt, has revealed and exploited the flaws of populist governance: its reliance on generalized societal mistrust, its low-quality personnel, its sub-optimal epistemic base, largely due to selection of mid- and high-level management founded on political loyalties rather than skills. And although the jury is still out, one thing is sure: The pandemic has not reinforced the global attractiveness of populist rule. Even if the cliché “The world will not be the same again” is correct, it is not the case that the masses of precariat and commentariat in democratic states will cry in unison: “We all want to be like the Hungarians (the Poles, the Brazilians – add your favorite populists here)!” The price to be paid for this lesson is exceedingly high, but then no one chose the test in the first place.

*

This book was completed before Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has provoked not only immediate military questions, but also broader reflections on the nature of the political regimes involved, and the growing contest between liberal democracy and alternative models of governance.

Neither the invader nor its victim belongs to the category of states discussed in this book, which deals with novel political systems in-between the full blown autocracy of Putin’s Russia and the democratizing project of pre-war Ukraine. The case studies discussed here are less oppressive than Russia but on a converse trajectory from that of Ukraine.

It is impossible to know what Russia’s aggression will mean for populism, both on the continent and around the world. Two of the case studies discussed in this book have already been affected by the invasion’s shockwaves. Poland has overnight become one of the world’s largest host countries for refugees and the venue for US presidential speeches about hope and liberal democracy. Suddenly, the Polish government has switched from attacking refugees to housing them, while simultaneously using the war as an opportunity to wrap itself with the flag, step up attacks on pro-rule-of-law forces within, and seek to distract the world, particularly Europe, from its multiple forms of democratic backsliding. Hungary’s government meanwhile has been exposed as a Putin-sympathising pariah and has earned the admonishment of Ukraine’s President Zelenski. In the midst of this, it has decisively won elections for the fourth time, partly by doubling down on the tactics described in this book, and partly with the promise that pandering to Putin will keep gas and petrol prices down. Doubtless, some of these trends will persist, others will fade, and still others are yet to emerge. Whether they will strengthen populism or weaken it, and unite liberal democracies or divide them, are key questions yet to be answered. What is at stake is more clear, and the subject of this book.