INTRODUCTION

Populism is a slippery concept, not least due to its use as a catch-all term for widely distinct political projects, extinguishing many of their differences. In the past I have argued (Cannon 2018) that we need to view populism as an academic analytical tradition rather than empirical fact, emphasizing instead the left/right dichotomy as the essential conceptual tool to help order, understand and explain political phenomena. In this chapter I develop this work further, using Bobbio's (1996) conception of the left/right dichotomy as a dyad, shaped by historical consensus and rupture centred on (in)equality. As Noël and Thérien (2008) argue, consensuses emerged between left and right on state development and welfare regimes in the post-Second World War period, and more recently, I argue here, around “progressive neoliberalism” (Fraser 2017) in the post-Cold War period. These global consensuses between left and right can be loosely mapped onto the Latin American experience, as respectively the postwar “state developmentalist” or classic “populist” phase, and the more recent phase of left-oriented “pink tide” governments. These have both been contested by right-oriented administrations, viewed in the dominant literature as respectively “neo-populism” in the 1990s (Weyland 1996, 2003; Roberts 1995), associated with figures such as Menem in Argentina, Collor in Brazil and most notably, Fujimori in Peru, and a more recent radical right populism, associated primarily with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In both these literatures, there is strong emphasis on the autonomy of the political from ideology, allowing the concept to “travel” temporally and spatially. In this chapter, I review both these instances of right-wing populism in Latin America consecutively, using a more contextually sensitive approach to these phenomena, which is best equipped to appreciate their distinctions, while emphasizing what they share. Such an approach needs to include, as Munck recommends in the introduction to this volume, the problematics of “development, democracy and social transformation”. Taken from this perspective, while each right-wing populist regime in the region is shaped by the distinct temporal and spatial circumstances in which it emerges, what they share is the right's central historical objective of maintaining and deepening social hierarchy, not just at the level of class, but also in gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

Are Latin America's populist movements complementary or inimical to the traditional left parties? Or, rather, are they a new type of left, more autochthonous, original and anchored in the subcontinent's realities, as opposed to those ideologies that arose in nineteenth-century Europe? These questions assume, on the one hand, an ahistorical perspective that implies not only a certain uniformity in these movements but also that there are similarities between those movements that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, and those progressive, post-2000, governments that were termed “the pink tide”. On the other hand, there is a problem in defining the term “left”. Are we referring to the many varieties of Marxist groups or do we include anarchists, left nationalists and movements such as the Third World Priests? In addition, the same movements, described by academics as “populist” would not consider themselves to be so. Here we will term “left” all those political movements who question capitalism as a social and economic system and will consider “populist” those movements that tend to consider themselves as a vehicle of the people and its aspirations, implying a progressive slant to their policies, and a challenge to established elites. As such, from a Latin American perspective, people like Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro would not be considered “populist”, while Cuba's Fidel Castro would be placed within the camp of the “left”.

These issues become even more complex if we consider that many of the initial populist movements, in the 1930s and 1940s, joined conservatives, moderates and leftists. At the same time, organizations such as the communist parties considered the new movements as indigenous versions of European fascism, while the populists tended to view the traditional left as competitors, that were extraneous and foreign to Latin American realities. Over half a century later, the pink tide included a large part of the organized left, who considered the reforms by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Evo Morales as the way towards a popular revolution. This chapter posits that national and historical circumstances tend to define the relationship between the diverse populist movements and the left.

In both popular and academic parlance, the term “populism” has taken on a more or less uniformly negative connotation. It implies being an enemy of democracy, anti-immigrant and, most obviously, irrationally under the sway of a charismatic leader. Yet in Latin America, populism has been an integral element of the development and democratization process and plays an important role in the contemporary process of social transformation under the left-of-centre governments that have emerged since the turn of the century. Thus, we need to deconstruct the term “populism” and explore its diverse historical manifestations, to rethink its meaning and its prospects moving forward.

This introduction to a volume consisting of detailed case studies of Latin American populism, or populism in Latin America, advances in several moments. First, I will approach the burgeoning international debate on rethinking populism to distil some broad lines of investigation, that might serve to guide our research. I distinguish between a structural/ocioeconomic frame for understanding populism, another where the focus is on populism as political strategy/style and, finally, one where populism is seen within an ideational or discursive frame. I also introduce the complex, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between populism and development, democracy and social transformation. A second section introduces several Latin American perspectives on populism in a broad conceptual sense. It examines the structural functionalist approach of the 1950s, the dependent development “compromise state” interpretation of the 1970s and, finally, the discourse approach and its critiques that dominated in the 1990s. We then move from the abstract to the concrete, with two stylized accounts of the classical populism of the 1930– 70 period and the contemporary populism that has emerged in the 1990s and, particularly, in the context of the progressive governments post-2000. This account is set in a broadly political economy frame, with a focus on the changing patterns of capital accumulation, the role of the state and the waves of popular mobilization that have characterized Latin America since 1930.

INTRODUCTION

Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in December 1998 after a decade of neoliberal policies in Venezuela. The previous period had seen: two successive governments implementing neoliberal economic programmes; the spontaneous popular uprising of February– March 1989, which shook the two-party political system in place since 1958; two nationalist and leftist military uprisings; and a sitting president removed from office by parliament on charges of corruption.

The so-called “Bolivarian process”, that began in Venezuela with the electoral triumph of Hugo Chávez in 1998, was the popular response to the crisis of legitimacy of the political model of representative democracy that had been in place since 1958 (López Maya 1994: 32; Carvallo & López Maya 1989: 49). The failure of the productive model of import substitution, the foundation of representative democracy for 30 years, had become evident by the mid-1980s, with a profound economic crisis that worsened with the fall in oil prices in 1986.

The spontaneous popular uprising of 27– 28 February 1989, known as the “Caracazo” (Barrios-Ferrer 1990: 55; España 1989: 118), revealed the great discontent of the population with a political-economic system that did not satisfy their fundamental needs. The government's brutal repressive response caused hundreds of deaths in the neighbourhoods of Caracas and nearby cities. It reinforced the view that those who governed did not deserve to enjoy the popular support that had sustained the ruling two-party political model for three decades. The two parties in question were the Acción Democrática (AD [Democratic Action]) and Partido Socialcristiano (COPEI [Social Christian party]).

However, in the absence of alternative political options, and with a left in crisis, both in its electoral versions and in the groups that maintained the armed struggle, the two-party system would remain in power for another decade. But the decomposition of the political model continued, and in 1992 two military uprisings followed one after the other. They both failed but they showed that the ship of representative democracy was still sinking.

In the political analysis of Latin America and Brazil, when we mention “populism”, we immediately think about the long tradition of figures such as Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), Juan Domingo Perón (Argentina), Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (Mexico) or José María Velasco Ibarra (Ecuador). It relates to a time when Latin America was going through a period of intense and complex processes of modernization and inclusion of the working class, within the framework of labour laws and political democracy. More recently, we have witnessed a “return” of populism in Latin America as elsewhere, but now in a conservative version and in a particular context in macroeconomic terms. Unlike the “classical” era of populism, the current neoliberal hegemony has led to a reduction of the role of the state, in favour of greater freedom for capital flows and a shrinking of the labour market, of social policies, of labour rights, and so on. Latin American presidents, characterized by their populist appeal, were very much part of this conjuncture, such as Alberto Fujimori (Peru) and Fernando Collor de Mello (Brazil). What does this new populism of the right signify? How does it relate to the classic populism and the original incorporation of the masses into the democratic order?

These debates are not just a concern from a historiographical or sociological point of view. They are part of the current political process itself, in the sense of building a political programme and claiming political traditions. In this sense, as a way of trying to counteract the neoliberal agenda put into practice in Brazil throughout the 1990s, and also of forming a political opposition to the governments of Fernando Collor de Mello and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Workers’ Party – Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – claimed the tradition of national developmentalism (Perlatto 2016). This tradition, which came from Getúlio Vargas (and the subsequent governments of Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart) implied a commitment to industrialization and modernization of the country and included the incorporation of the working population into citizenship via the Labour Court. However, it was achieved without shaking the foundations of the primary sector of the economy, based on the large exporting rural areas, and thus was some kind of compromise state.

INTRODUCTION

There is only one great consensus about populism, and that is that it is a phenomenon that is difficult to define. Indeed, although Latin America has had different populist experiences since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no less true that its conceptualization continues to be complex. At the beginning of the 1970s, Octavio Ianni, one of the intellectuals who most deeply explored this issue, argued that, despite the dissimilar historical experiences lived by the countries of the region, populism burst into most of them as a mass movement that was installed in the centre of the structural ruptures that accompanied the crises of the world capitalist system and, by extension, of the Latin American oligarchies (Ianni 1973: 85). From these crises and with the masses constituted as political actors, the state was restructured under bourgeois leadership. The new ruling elites, supported by different social sectors, especially workers and the middle classes, carried out a profound reorganization of the economy, emphasizing state dirigisme, and based on it, redistributed part of the income expressed as social policy. This, in turn, operated as a strategy of clientelism which, on the one hand, consolidated the adhesion of the masses to charismatic leaderships and, on the other, reconfigured power relations (Ianni 1973: 106– 49). The regime of passions and emotions played a fundamental role in this, which in the perspective of Rosanvallon, activated the populist mobilization and rooted the bond of relationship with the leader (Rosanvallon 2020: 53– 5).

However, the historical rhythms of this process, as Osmar González (2007: 87– 92) points out, were different. In some countries, such as Peru under Guillermo Billinghurst (1912– 14) or Uruguay during the second period of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1911– 15), the process began at the beginning of the twentieth century. In others, such as Brazil under Getúlio Vargas (1930– 45) or Mexico under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934– 40), the process began in the 1930s.

But populism is not reduced only to the type of state, or to the power relations that were constituted at a given historical moment, nor is it restricted to the leader who embodied it. It also refers to the people, meaning the masses that give political force to the movement. According to this perspective, populist movements were heterogeneous.

Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega began a fourth consecutive term in office in January 2022, in the midst of a political and economic crisis that portends protracted instability in the Central American country. Since returning to office in 2007, Ortega and his wife, and vice-president, Rosario Murillo have dressed in a quasi-leftist discourse of “Christian, Socialist, and Solidarity”, their programme of constructing a populist multiclass alliance under the firm hegemony of capital and Sandinista state elites. This alliance began to unravel in the second decade of the century, and then collapsed entirely in the aftermath of the government's violent repression of a 2018 mass popular uprising. The repression – which according to Amnesty International involved excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, control of the media and the deployment of pro-government paramilitary squads against protesters (Amnesty International 2018) – left several hundred dead and sent tens of thousands more into exile.

With seven opposition presidential candidates imprisoned and held incommunicado in the months leading up to the November 2021 vote, and all the remaining contenders but one coming from small parties allied with Ortega and Murillo and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the results of the presidential elections were a foregone conclusion. In a complete breakdown of the rule of law, Ortega carried out a wave of repression from May to October, arresting, and detaining without trial, under various draconian national security laws, several dozen opposition figures. Among them were presidential candidates; peasant, labour and student leaders; journalists; and environmentalists. Several hundred others were forced into exile or underground.

Those arrested or forced underground in the pre-electoral crackdown included a number of historical revolutionary leaders, among them legendary guerrilla commanders Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres. Both had participated in the 1978 raid on the National Palace that forced the Somoza dictatorship to free 60 political prisoners, and Torres had also participated in the daring 1974 Christmas party raid that forced Somoza to release Daniel Ortega from prison. Among those exiled were celebrated novelist, and Ortega's vice-president during the 1980s revolution, Sergio Ramirez.

INTRODUCTION

Talking about populism is fashionable nowadays. The term is enunciated in political debates, social networks and scholarly circles, and it is used interchangeably to praise or denigrate political figures of any ideological sign. Without going deeply into the intricacies of the term, its historical contexts and characteristics, maybe it is worth remembering that it first referred to late nineteenth-century social movements as different and distant as those of Russia and of the United States, whose only common traits were their closeness to “the people” and opposition to the established order.

The “populist wind” arrived in Latin America several years later. The names of Brazil's Getúlio Vargas and Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón remain in the collective memory and history. To them, we must add the most recent and abounding wave: Carlos Menem, Hugo Chávez, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, each in their own context. More recently, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has joined this list. If there is one thing these leaders have in common, it is their “personal style of governing”, as Daniel Cosío Villegas used to say.

The populist “rebirth” has been propelled by economic transformations: widening social and educational inequalities, those related to gender, race and access to public services; increasing poverty; various forms of violence; social exclusion and dysfunction; and biases of the democratic systems.

Populist movements emerge as responses to crises of representation whereby elites are incapable/refuse to respond to people's grievances (Arditi 2007: 56). Populism may thus be understood as a regular feature of politics, representing a subversive challenge to the status quo, and as a launching point for a reconstruction of a new order when the previous one has lost legitimacy (Laclau 2005: 177). Indeed, populism may be understood as part of a process of social transformation, a protective movement of society in response to the excessive expansion of the free market (Polanyi 1944).

Where the interests of the wealthiest sectors of society are organized into politics, while issues concerning popular classes are organized out, democracy loses legitimacy. Where left/right party-party differences narrow, popular indifference and distrust of parties and institutions grows (Mair 2013). Mistrust in the political system, alongside withdrawal from participation, opens space for a movement of opposition (Schmitter 2019: 152). As parties/politicians become detached from their traditional social bases, while inequality and socioeconomic precarity become entrenched, democracy is viewed by excluded sectors as a facade for the maintenance of elite privilege. Appealing to a sense of personal danger and a shared sense of political exclusion, populists may portray the political class as having failed, and likely to continue to fail, effectively barring citizens from any realistic prospect of a better life (Dunn 2019: 56).

Such a decomposition of legitimacy of the prevailing model of democracy occurred in several Latin American states around the turn of the millennium. Anti-system outsiders emerged where labour-based and centre-left parties were at the forefront of advancing neoliberal policies, a configuration found in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela (Roberts 2015). The adoption of neoliberal policies by centre-left parties caused party systems to converge around variants of market orthodoxy, programmatically de-aligning partisan competition and channelling societal opposition into extra-systemic forms of social and electoral protest, thereby opening vacant political space for outsiders on the left flank of mainstream parties (ibid.)

INTRODUCTION

In the international debate on populism, the Argentine political philosopher, Ernesto Laclau, achieved a key epistemological shift, when he ascribed populism to the ways of constructing the political within a logic of articulations, in a dynamic of equivalences and heterogeneities (Laclau 2005). Thus, for Laclau “populism is simply a way of constructing the political”, and the political is always populist (Laclau 2005: 11). In this way, he counteracts the type of consensus that presented populism as a threat to liberal democracy, as well as broadening the field of possible theorists for the debate on populism.

Laclau's epistemological turn is based on the theoretical weaknesses of the concept of populism, and its inability to generate a canonical definition. The resistance to granting a strong epistemological support to this notion of populism is due to a position of principle, with respect to the theorization of liberal democracy, that is universal and teleological, and with a political subject that is essentially grounded. That is why, from this point of view, populism is considered as a syndrome of liberal democracy (Wiles 1969), or as a pathology of societies in full economic development and political modernization, that would prevent such development and economic growth (Edwards 2019).

The presence of the charismatic leader who turned the people against the oligarchies and polarized the political system within a Manichean strategy, takes up Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy notion. While this can somehow describe populism, in reality, it does not explain it epistemologically (Tushnet 2019). The aporia of liberalism that prevents that conceptualization is that, without the construction of the “people”, there is no populism, but neither is there democracy (Laclau 2005: 213). Precisely because of this, Laclau proposes to change strategy and not to ask what populism is (because there is still no epistemologically convincing answer on its definition), but rather to ask: “to what social and political reality does populism refer? … of what reality or social situation is populism an expression” (Laclau 2005: 31). In this way, and as Peruzzotti puts it, Laclau “turned the debate on populism on its head” (Peruzzotti 2019: 33).

As the purpose of this book is the study of populism in Latin America, it would be understandable to skip the debate about the conceptualization of the term. Yet, without conceptualization, debates are hollow. If we do not define populism, how can we agree whether Salvador Allende or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can be characterized as populists? And, how can we understand the relations between populism and other essentially contested concepts (Collier et al. 2006) such as democracy? Contributors to this book define populism in a variety of ways, which results in different answers to the many questions raised by the study of populism in the region. In this overview, I will first briefly outline my understanding of populism, a conceptualization that is grounded on Ernesto Laclau's influential writings on the topic, and which is also broadly in line with the one adopted by Ronaldo Munck in the introduction to this book.

Laclau's (1979, 2005a, 2005b) theory of populism centres on the priority that populism attributes to the constitution of “the people” as a political actor within an antagonistic relation, that pits the people against a certain Other (typically, the oligarchy, the political or economic elite, the establishment, etc.). According to this criterion, the sociopolitical field is structured as a dichotomous, antagonistic relation between two sociopolitical blocs: Us (the people, the underdogs, the oppressed) and Them (the oligarchy, neoliberalism, the partocracy, etc.). The criterion also implies that populist actors take sides, by claiming to represent the underdogs or, as Igor Goicovic (Chapter 3) puts it, “the social bloc of the oppressed”.

The people, as a political actor, are the outcome of political identification, and not a pre-existing social category. As a signifier, “the people” is always something retroactively constituted, an empty signifier that needs to be invoked, a performative call that creates what it is supposed to be expressing. In this approach, the signifier, “the people” operates as a nodal point, around which different, and often antithetical, signifiers are articulated to assert who are the people and who represents them.

Populism is perhaps one of the most overused, yet under-analysed, terms in political discourse today. It can embrace authoritarian and nativist right-wing politicians, but also those on the left who appeal for popular support for transformation. In its dominant usage it is seen as inimical to the values of liberal democracy. Yet others see it as part of the construction of a “people”-centred project that can help us democratize democracy, to put it that way. What is clear is that much of the debate around populism has been from the perspective of the global North and the voice of the South has been largely missing.

The term “populism” today spells, for most people in the global North, something akin to racism and with dark memories of fascism lurking in the background. The “populists” who come to mind are Orbán, Le Pen, Farage or Trump, who cultivate a mass base around the needs of the “left behind” or native-born. The political elites are cast as globalizers, not from somewhere in particular, and dangerously complacent about the dangers of being swamped by mass immigration.

In Latin America the same term has had a very different resonance. It is bound up with democratization, the incorporation of the working classes, and the making of the national developmental state. Its emergence is marked by the crisis of the conservative export-oriented state in the 1930s that burst into the open after the Second World War, with the growth of an organized labour movement and the consolidation of nationalism in the new world order that emerged. This gave way to what can be called a compromise state that replaced the old oligarchic state, and in which the popular masses were both mobilized and controlled by what became known as populist state politics.

There have been many interpretations of populism in Latin America. Early studies tended to place it in terms of the modernization of society and the emergence of disposable masses, waiting to be captured by an ideology that would promote social change while maintaining the stability of the dominant order.

On the first day of 2007, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office for his second term as president of the republic of Brazil. The event marked an important political moment for left-wing Brazilian and Latin American political forces. As if it was not enough to have won the presidential elections for the first time in 2002, the Workers’ Party – Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – now demonstrated that it could lead a government in an environment of relative institutional stability and achieve its continuity by democratic means. Unlike what happened at the first inauguration, when around 150,000 people took over Brasília with many red flags to welcome the new government, the second presidential inauguration was more discrete and less effusive. Once the novelty of four years earlier had passed, the inauguration of a president with Lula's personal and political trajectory no longer generated so much impact.

But it cannot be said that presidential inaugurations of democratically elected presidents in Brazil had become so frequent that they no longer attracted attention. Since the founding of the city of Brasília in 1960, a landmark of Brazilian modernist architecture and an expression of the developmental nationalism that had inspired government policies in the period immediately following World War II, it was only the sixth time that a president, elected by universal suffrage, had begun their mandate. The military dictatorship, imposed after the 1964 coup d’état, interrupted a relatively open and competitive political process that had begun in 1945. However, even in the brief democratic experience that the country had lived until the military took power, the left and popular forces had few opportunities to directly contest the popular vote and present a programme of social change. The Brazilian Communist Party was legalized in 1945, ran for presidential elections and managed to elect a small but symbolic and combative group of congressmen. However, in the context of insertion of the country into the geopolitics of the Cold War, the communists were forced to return to their usual clandestine activity, being outlawed from national political life in 1947.

INTRODUCTION

Populist movements usually emerge as events: no one is expecting them, but they suddenly take place. Because they directly affect established domination regimes, due to the fact that they are anti-establishment movements strongly supported by important sectors of the subaltern classes, both adhering and opposing sides tend to highlight their disruptive character. The former experience them as revolutions, and the latter as cursed creations of a leader with authoritarian tendencies and charismatic attributes who manages to ideologically manipulate the masses by resorting to irrational elements. Fortunately, these longstanding, deep-rooted categorizations have progressively lost their strength and have led to less emotionally and politically driven analyses. However, there is still a tendency in this direction, as seen in questions like the ones in the title of this chapter, which (as many others) seeks to analyse the Argentine case of populism in terms of whether Peronism is right wing or left wing. But is this question as posed even appropriate to better understand a phenomenon such as Peronism? A perspective anchored in a “Yes, it is”/“No, it is not” polarity can only partially ensure a critical and objective approach to explain Peronism. It is my intention to explore the conceptual potential of the idea of simultaneity as a passive revolution, in terms of the relationship between Peronism and the working class, to allow us to bring the heterogeneity of historical reality into play.

EX MACHINA ORIGIN

A prevailing tendency of sociologists, historians and political scientists, when interpreting Peronism, was to search for its permanent characteristics in its original stage. Gino Germani, an Italian sociologist who escaped fascism, was the initiator of that initial scheme, based on a structural-functionalist interpretation of a failed correspondence between socioeconomic modernization and political participation. This concept was surpassed gradually. As decades passed, an explanation anchored in its origin was seen as insufficient to describe it, either as a political identity that remained unshakable for most of the Argentinian working class or in terms of the politico-ideological evolution that occurred in the country as of the 1960s.

The value of this book is, above all, in its erudite restatement of the centrality of Latin America to the theorization of populism and, by implication, representation, citizenship and the state. That the region does not occupy a more important position within the sociological literature on populism, citizenship and the state, and is not used more widely as the basis for comparative social theory, is a frank mystery – and one this book sets out to challenge. The fault lies with longstanding biases in social science that mean Latin American states and societies are more frequently studied for what they fail to be, instead of what they are. There is little point imagining Latin American states will behave like European ones since they emerged from quite different social and political circumstances, have different levels of capacity, and face different dilemmas. But, instead of probing these differences analytically, Latin America so often finds itself shoehorned into social and political theories that render it, almost inevitably, failing and deviant. And even when the region offers rich, complex, multifaceted histories of important political phenomena that could serve as the starting point for wider theoretical debate – as with populism – its vital contribution is still all too easily side-lined or bolted awkwardly onto theories driven by Anglophone and European narratives. In the case of populism, this really is a huge opportunity lost, since on this particular subject, Latin America is a gift that keeps on giving, as this admirable set of studies makes abundantly clear.

All experiments in populist politics begin with grievances of citizens or subjects who think they deserve better from government. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that one important contribution of this collection stems from the set of essays that explores populism as the expression of those grievances within the context of the Latin American left. Emphasizing the roots of populism as – at least at times – a vehicle for progressive social demands, stands in refreshing contrast to the contemporary emphasis, in the media and European scholarship especially, on populism as the expression of radical right politics and the rise of chauvinism, racism, xenophobia and extreme, and frequently gendered, law and order programmes of social control.