Introduction

In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.

The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.

In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.

A switch was flicked, and a hologram, 8 metres long and 2 metres wide, appeared. Under the impressive India Gate of New Delhi, on 23 January 2022, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated a hologram monument of the politician and military leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) (ABP News 2022). The statue celebrates the controversial, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic Bose for his defiance of the British during the independence struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. It fits with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) agenda to show that ‘the history of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved the country’ (Times of India 2021). Modi's party seeks to challenge a supposedly ‘elitist’ and ‘colonial’ narrative of Indian history (Khan et al. 2017; Zachariah 2020). The BJP finds examples in ‘heroes’ such as Bose, uses DNA to claim a link between contemporary Hindus and India's first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and treats ancient Hindu scripture as fact and not myth (Chapter 5; Jain and Lasseter 2018).

Sixteen thousand kilometres away from New Delhi, a different populist ‘politics of history’ unfolded over the past two decades. Evo Morales, the leader of the left-wing populist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and the first indigenous president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, promoted a policy of anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal ‘cultural and democratic revolution’ to inaugurate a ‘new phase of history’ after colonialism (Morales 2006). By performing highly mediatized political ceremonies at indigenous heritage sites such as his alternative ‘spiritual’ inauguration at the Tiwanaku site, by celebrating figures such as eighteenth-century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari (c. 1750–1781), and by using indigenous notions such as pachakuti (the future in the past), Morales attempted to ‘decolonize’ Bolivian history (Dangl 2019; García Jerez and Müller 2015). Grand symbolic gestures were familiar to Morales, too. On 21 June 2014, his government installed a counterclockwise running timepiece on the Congress building of La Paz. Symbolizing that Bolivians must ‘undo their history’ and challenge colonial standards, this ‘clock of the south’ invited them to ‘think creatively and disobey Western norms’ (BBC News 2014). Although the MAS started out along ethno-populist lines and was dominated by Quechua-speaking indigenous people, it never defined this indigeneity in strict exclusivist terms.

Introduction

In Neamat Imam's 2015 novel The Black Coat, the reader follows the path of a former Bangladesh Liberation War journalist and his charge, a rural migrant adept at impersonating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman amidst the raging famine of 1974. Imam takes stock of the populist potential of Sheikh Mujib by portraying him as both the exalted leader and every Bengali. In effect, he has no features as he subsumes the whole people.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the leader of the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), the principal national liberation party during Bangladesh's independence struggle and currently still the country's ruling faction. With the end of British colonialism in the subcontinent and the partition of India in 1947, the eastern part of Bengal became East Pakistan, a province geographically separated from its West Pakistan counterpart. The Pakistan period is often remembered in Bangladesh as the second period of colonial rule. Mujib became the leading figure not only within the AL but for the entire independence struggle, which eventually culminated in the 1971 Liberation War. Although imprisoned for nearly the entire war, he became known as the Father of the Nation and was attributed the honorific title ‘Bangabandhu’ (Friend of Bengal) by his followers.

After independence, Mujib was lauded as the country's first president and later prime minister. However, unable to resolve the high levels of internal conflict and graft in the early years after independence, and following a devastating famine in 1974, Mujib saw his attraction and that of his party erode. In 1975, Mujib moved towards a one-party model to maintain control over his crumbling polity and to control AL greed more directly. Before his plan could be fully executed, he – and his whole family, apart from his daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana – were killed in a coup attempt in August 1975 (Ali 2010: 55–113).

Introduction

After the demise of the communist system in 1989, Poland experienced a rapid and largely successful transition to the market economy and liberal democracy. The democratic institutions, although newly established, seemed well grounded and, for a long time, were not overtly contested by any major political forces, including post-communists. The challenge to the Polish version of the liberal, representative democracy came with the rise to power of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, or PiS). The latter, founded in 2001, governed for the first time in 2005–2007 and, later, in 2015–2023. The first period was relatively short and could be seen as forming the concepts and methods which were fully implemented only after the second accession to power. The policy of the PiS has been aimed at subverting the rule of law, especially the division of powers and the independence of the judiciary. The core of the rhetoric of the PiS has been the claim of representing ‘the nation’, which so far was mute, culturally neglected, and economically exploited. The PiS presents itself as the first Polish party that embodies the interests and values of ‘average people’ versus elites, provinces versus large cities, ‘true’ Poles versus cosmopolites, and traitors acting on foreign orders (Germany, the European Union [EU]). The indispensable element of its discourse is the condemnation of allegedly corrupt, inept, post-communist, or liberal elites that ruled Poland for most of the time after the 1989 breakthrough (Kim 2021; Sadurski 2019). The key features of the politics and ideology of the PiS place this party, despite many important differences, among other European populist movements of right-wing and nationalistic orientation. The PiS is often seen alongside the Hungarian Fidesz, whose example it openly declares to follow, the French Rassemblement National, the Fratelli d`Italia, and even, to some extent, the Alternative für Deutschland, although any allegiance with the latter is deliberately avoided.

The specific trait of the PiS as a political and social movement is the importance of culture and religion as sources of mass mobilization and identification and, consequently, its political successes and resilience in holding power. Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik coined the expression ‘symbolic thickening of public culture’ to refer to the specific cultural grounds from which the Polish version of populism arose and benefited (Kotwas and Kubik 2019).