The Morning Post of Padua / by Roberta Paolini
Populism as a cipher of the present, the attitude of growth and then normalization of a movement that becomes political and imposes itself as a distributor of utopias, that annihilates intermediate bodies and insinuates itself as extremism of common sense in a modernity destroyed by bits in its concrete reality and recomposed into another reality, digital, illusorily free, individualistic and tremendously lonely. A reality experienced as eu-topic and nostalgic but revealing its atopic basis, its disorientation. Ilvo Diamanti wrote about it four hands with sociologist Marc Lazard, the most careful French analyst of Italian political facts, they called it Popolocracy, titling their latest book. A title that in sharp antithesis to the nobler term “democracy” and indicates, on the contrary, immediate power. The transition from representative democracy to direct democracy is popolocracy. On Saturday at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the editor of Il Mattino di Padova, la tribuna di Treviso, la Nuova di Venezia e Mestre and the Corriere delle Alpi, Paolo Possamai discussed it together with Italian political scientist and sociologist Diamanti and historian Karoline Roerig as part of Il Festival Città Impresa. A number of distinctive traits emerged that, starting from Diamanti’s timely analysis, draw the contours and destinations of the success of parties such as the 5 Star Movement and the League. “Populism is often used as an undefined concept,” Diamanti says, “we use it with its prescriptive and not descriptive valence.
In pronouncing the word we make a judgment; what we do not like is populist. Forgetting that the semantic basis is its reference to the people, to the demos.” It is that feeling of antipolitics that in Italy, as Possamai recalls, “gave rise in the 1940s to the Front of Everyman, which gathered the consensus of those who did not feel represented.” There are three pillars that support populism: “The critique of elites, the demand for borders, if there is no other, a foreigner, defining there is no populism,” but the others are also the establishment, in its accomplished and globalized form: the European Union. “Finally,” Diamanti says, “the critique of representative democracy. Indeed, the digital utopia pushes one to believe that it is possible to recreate the Agora, “the myth of being able to rebuild the square and give life to an immediate democracy, deprived of intermediate bodies, a direct democracy.” This distrust of the present reiterates Diamanti fuels populist movements and parties, it is their fuel, because it gives voice to those “who feel peripheral to power.” “Yet in France an establishment champion like Emmanuel Macron won,” Possamai points out. Diamanti and Roering’s response destabilizes: both Macron and Angela Merkel, emanations of established power, have borrowed populist categories to counter the advance of alternative movements to the system. And they have won because of it. More, they have personified their political offering: “Populism is the party of leaders, of leaders with whom one can identify,” Diamanti says. And so En Marche!, Macron’s party repurposes the very initials of the French president’s name EM. While the Chancellor becomes the guarantee for Germany with her Grosse Koalition.But if populism infects the establishment, in turn parties like the 5 Star Movement soften their tones and “normalize.” “It is the Christian counterdemocracy,” Diamanti explains, “the mass party that operates in Italy with an absolute political transversality, absorbing votes on the right and left, populism is no longer deplorable is crossed with democracy.