Beyond “democracy vs. populism: Urbinati’s theory of populism from a Central European perspective

This article criticizes the tendency to subsume under “populism”, in an undifferentiated manner, both national-conservative movements with authoritarian tendencies and post-ideological movements promising to replace the incompetence and corruption of established parties with technocratic efficiency and/or civic virtue. It calls for an internally differentiated conception of populism that does not reduce it to an antidemocratic phenomenon. In this context, Nadia Urbinati’s position is ambiguous. As she depicts the political upheavals of the last decade through the prism of “democracy vs. populism”, her position amounts to a clear example of the framework this article rejects. By emphasizing anti-establishmentarian and anti-partisan features of populism, however, she opens the door, albeit inadvertently, to a conception of populism that could include actors that aim to transcend established modes of party organization and classical partisan ideologies of the 19th century, without necessarily subverting democracy and the globalist or pro-European orientation of their countries.