The essay brings out how, with the fall of the parties, populism changed from being a merely deviant form to becoming the mark of a fragile democracy manoeuvred by the deceitful narratives of the leaders. Personalization, the charismatic leader, and the body that seduces through the imagination, are the result of a profound lack of political construction and social subjectivity. The author traces the origins of Italian neopopulism in the combination of politics and the economy, and attributes its victory to the lack of social subjects able to give new forms to conflict, and party structures able to mediate between the state and society. In this sense, the alternative to populism is, on the one hand, a rediscovered capacity to return to mediation, and, on the other, the recovery of the functional differentiation between politics and the economy.only subscribers can see the full article

The three pieces that follow by Morena Piccinini, Riccardo Terzi and Mario Tronti, are based on thoughts already presented by them at the Forum. Morena Piccinini’s contribution reflects above all on the «inverse» relations between populisms and universalistic social policies, underlining the unions’ role in promoting the latter, and so also promoting and safeguarding democratic systems. Riccardo Terzi’s thoughts criticize the idea of populism as the only definition of a differentiated variety of phenomena, movements and parties that – being also the consequence of contemporary social fragmentation – should not be combated on the moralistic or «metaphysical » plane of ideas, but starting from concrete social change. reconstructs the (altered) nexuses between the idea of a people and populist action and offers some highly topical thoughts on the commitment and strategies that politics should adopt to reconstruct the damaged ties between society and institutions, political choice and organized representation.only subscribers can see the full article

After giving a theoretical account of the phenomenon, the author looks at the reasons that have led to the rise of populist parties in Europe; these include the crisis of the Fordist model of industrial output and the resulting changes that have broken up the old classes, introducing an ever more noticeable fragmentation of the great social groupings on which the mass parties were founded. She underlines, on the one hand, how we are faced with political forces that have quickly understood the emerging unease; on the other hand, she shows how the populist parties have promptly occupied the political vacuum left by the traditional ones. However, what they offer is inadequate to the challenges they are faced with and that require the recovery of the function of aggregation the parties once performed, with the aim of offering once again a prospect that can give faith in the future.only subscribers can see the full article