Artikel

De dialectiek van populistische regimes

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Abstract

The dialectic of populist regimes - A lot of regimes in developing countries in the sixties were labelled as “populist”, although none of them called themselves as such. This article is a first attempt to describe the general conditions leading eventually towards populist regimes and to decipher the dynamic forces responsable for the rise and fall of those regimes. The general conditions giving populism a chance, are to be found in the crisis - both social, political and economic - of a mainly agricultural society, confronted with commodity production and neo-imperialism. Populist movements arise when there is a broadly shared belief in the inability of the old system to resolve the basic problems. The key issue is that for both the middle-class and the popular masses mobility is blocked by internal and external forces. Non of those classes is able to act as a dominant political movement or to elaborate a clear-cut ideology. The populist movement remains a cross-class movement, led by the middle-classes but based on the numeral force of the popular masses. Its vague anti-status-quo ideology is embodied into the charismatic leader. It is neither able to attend a pure bourgeois or a genuine socialist character. It uses a radical language, but its nationalism is not translated into concrete measures against external forces, and its internal politics are only quasi-revolutionary. The ideology of the “common-interest” does not withstand a downward economic trend. The cross-class alliance falls into pieces and classes try to organise themselves into autonomous forces. This means the end of populism and creates the general political atmosphere for the army to intervene in order to save the country from total collapse and the so-called communist danger.

How to Cite:

Doom, R., (1978) “De dialectiek van populistische regimes”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 23(4), 321–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.96094