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Johan Leman, 19 February 2024

What do we mean by populism? According to Cas Mudde, populism is a ‘thin’ ideology that sees society in a strongly hostile way divided into a pure ‘people’ and a ‘corrupt cultural and intellectual elite’. The populist believes that ‘the people’, not ‘the elite’, should from now on be allowed to make their mark on politics. Mudde calls this ideology ‘thin’ because its content is intellectually speaking ‘nothing’ and sometimes even nonsens.

Populism is very present in the West today. It allows itself to be fed mainly by feelings of fear. Fear of migration, fear of the other, fear of the climate change,… In short: anything that points to change can become a source of fear. Migration and inclusion are areas par excellence that lend themselves to a populist approach.

“Hope makes vote,” Jesse Jackson, former presidential candidate of the US once told me once when I was still working at the Centre for equal opportunities and fight against racism.  You must try to reverse populism by giving people a positive perspective. Now there are 2 paths to that: making a huge promise for something extremely positive even if you know you won’t be able to achieve during a subsequent legislature, or proposing a very realistic multiple positive programme proposal that is realisable. The second option seems to me to be the better formula, but requires extremely good dossier knowledge. Or maybe you should combine both? Either way, very concrete hope…that’s the point.

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