The re-election of Donald Trump to the White House demonstrates once again that populism is on the rise in the United States, Argentina, Hungary, Italy, and even in France. Populism was born at the end of the 19th century in Russia to oppose the Tsar. Today, it is a hatred of elites, of institutions, of the system.
franceinfo: Why does populism manage to appeal so much?
Jean Viard: It is not just a hatred of the elites, it is also a hatred of immigrants and the weakest. So it’s really the idea that deep down, it’s the power of good people, we’ll put it like that. It is a central power, which excludes the very rich, and which excludes the disadvantaged, the poor, etc. and society moves with the right/left dialectic – we could call it capital/labor – and some bring one idea, others bring another, we vote again, we move forward, we move back, etc. That's the dynamic.
There, there are moments when society has completely bifurcated. The capital/labor issue is no longer central. The two big issues are the relationship between men and women and above all, the takeover of power by nature over humanity, over our history. So politicians no longer know how to govern these two major subjects.
But what is certain is that if we take the people who went to church 40 years ago, they were 35%. The people who voted communist were 25%. Basically, the two big camps made it 60%. Today, they have 6% left. So there is no longer this construction, populism occupies the space by saying: let's not change, let's keep power over women, let's keep power over colonies or immigrants, let's keep power over nature, basically, This is Trump, this is this speech. He would have given the same speech 100 years ago, it was banal, so simply it is a conservative, reactionary speech, which is indeed a central speech, because there is no other way.
What you are telling us is that rather than seeking to denounce this populism, we should instead seek to question what is not working in democracy?
The problem is that the camp of what we could call the liberal left, in the broad sense, cannot at the moment manage to have a coherent thought. There are clashes, some are green, others are anti-capitalist, etc. We have such a relationship when we are on the left with capitalism, with businesses, that the idea of having large ecological companies almost seems like unpronounceable words. In France, we have particular work to do on these subjects.
We also ultimately see a link between populism, protectionism, nationalism, is there a closure that often goes with it?
Of course…While any government first protects its population, that is the least it can do, and the Americans have always been relatively protectionist. But they are more so at the moment, including because after the great pandemic, globalization retreated, because for a period, we had no choice, we were obliged, and then we realized that it was better to do business with your neighbors than with something on the other side of the world where you were completely dependent on a single supplier, so there is a mental change that has taken place.
And then at the same time, the climate crisis is so evident globally – we are all part of it, we are all actors and we are all part of the solution. And so there is a tendency to withdraw into oneself and say: we're going to wait for this to pass. This is what is happening with the Americans, they say to themselves: we will wait for this to pass, we will try to block the Chinese, the Europeans, and then we will see. But we simply cannot wait for it to pass, because the earth is heating up.
Is it populism that threatens democracy or is it the disconnection of those who lead?
No, it's the fact that we have branched off, we have taken a new direction, we have left the industrial revolution, we have entered the great climate war, and there is a political time for transformation, that takes time. time. And for now, we are between two models, and between these two models, there is an easy solution: let's bring together all the good people and exclude all those who don't look like us, and denounce the others, put up borders and close -us on us.
It is a position of expectation that I would describe as negative, even if I respect it. And the question for that is that we must above all push others to build a project for the economic and cultural development of an ecological and individual world. It is the construction of another path that will push back populism, like the last time, at the beginning of the 20th century.
