Without a doubt, one of the most interesting aspects of political analysis is to determine the sociological origin of the electoral supports of populism, that is, where does the desire to vote for populist leaders in our society come from? It is known that we are more and more informed and have knowledge of this type of political strategy, however, populist leaders always attract large numbers of followers.
Depending on how we understand what populism is, we can better analyze where its support comes from. If there is one thing we can conclude, it is that populism is not just a left-wing or right-wing phenomenon. It is a transversal phenomenon that can haunt different political spectrums. Whatever our consideration of populism is, one thing is clear: populism is cancer within our forms of government organization.
Populism presupposes, therefore, an imminent political failure that promotes virtual demands for change through the appeal of a political subject, the people, to constitute a new form of political domination that leads neither to classical totalitarianism nor to a representative democratic regime.
Populism is a political experiment, in which a political party, a social movement or a charismatic leader aims to reach power, through legal and democratic means. Populism is more of a political process than an institutional process. It is generally at the moment of political institutionalization when populism has before it all its contradictions; democracy vs. dictatorship. Populism, as I mentioned before, has no clear affinity to any a priori political ideology, its only objective is to be able to agglutinate the greatest possible number of sympathizers that allow it to reach power.
In general, populist discourse is a discourse constructed on the basis of oppositions of two sides (oppressed-oppressors, poor-rich, caste-plebe…) therefore the main characteristic and the main strategy is polarization, a resource that is used so that a given group of society can identify a clear enemy. Politics is understood as the exclusion and eviction of the enemy from the institutional mechanisms of power. The greater the disaffection and disenchantment of the population, the greater the possibilities of the triumph of populist options. There is another essential element in the populist experiment: the rehabilitation of passions and emotions as basic elements of political action, elements that are exploited by populist leaders.
In many European countries and their systems of representative democracy, aspects of the social reality of their citizens have been sidelined in political debates. Representative democracies tend to emphasize the importance of the idea of consensus and rationalization as fundamental instruments of a democratically healthy society. Populism follows the route initiated by fascist irrationalism, emphasizing the importance of collective emotions as instruments to vindicate social demands.
On the other hand, collective emotion allows us to restore solidarity between individuals, much damaged by the narcissism and individualism that characterizes postmodernity. We live in the era of the "malaise of modernity". Our "modern" representative democracies are increasingly formal and procedural. And they dilute the feelings of solidarity of the citizens, leaving the most disadvantaged sectors of society to their fate. The public space for debate and deliberation disappears among the parties, which refuse to articulate new means of expression and citizen participation. We live in times that facilitate the access of populist leaders to power.
The condition of citizens as participating agents in the political scene of any country is limited by elections conditioned in their outcome by large corporations, lobbies, and media. Populism for its part promises to break with those hegemonic power structures that have always prevailed through the creation of bonds of natural and spontaneous solidarity.
An analysis of the profile of populist sympathizers would find great diversity among them. On the one hand, we would have intellectuals or people with a high level of political formation, knowledgeable of critical approaches to capitalism, globalization, representative democracy and generally the activist of a multitude of social and civic movements. Children or grandchildren of the socialist generation of May '68.
Then there is another spectrum of voters, the fruit of banalization and the conversion of political discussion into a mass spectacle, into an entertainment product. It is the passionate element within the populist gear. They are generally rather uncritical followers and activists of social networks, little given to the rational confrontation of ideas and proposals, more given to the rapid consumption of fast-absorbing slogans.
A large number of supporters of populism come from those excluded by the system, those who had no accommodation or hope in the system. Globalization and the educational disaster in the West condemn millions of people to a miserable existence. In an era of secularization, politics becomes a religion for the masses, who are more than ever in need of messianic figures who promise them a future far from hardship and economic difficulties.
Finally, there is a part of populism that joins him for strategic reasons in order to improve his current socioeconomic situation, these are people not at all mistreated by the system, many of them very well placed in the system itself (civil servants, medium-sized entrepreneurs …). Those who sense change before others and seek to secure their position of power and pre-eminence.
The West needs change so that society can really prosper, otherwise, we will continue to face more and more frequent involutions that stop social development and promote violations of freedoms in the name of the people as a legitimate agent.
