From populism to democratic legitimism: towards a radical reconsideration of populism as a political category

ABSTRACT This article argues that the political category of populism has been constituted, historically, on the basis of political parties and leaders who, in complex performative processes, have been defined as populists. Those performative processes have been implemented in hegemonic academic, media and political discourses that are underpinned by ideological biases and political stratagems. As a consequence, the political category of populism is incoherent and diffuse, while the predominant explanations of populism, deriving mainly from Cas Mudde and Ernesto Laclau, have led to broad and generic definitions. Those definitions are inconsistent, given that they not only can be applied to political leaders and parties designated as populist, but also to almost any other political party or leader who, in their specific historical context, questions the democratic credentials of an existing political system, while proposing themselves as the standard bearer for the only legitimate and true democracy. Proposed in this article, therefore, is the creation of a new political category called ‘democratic legitimism’ or ‘demo-legitimism’, which would include populist discourse as just one of many types of demo-legitimist discourses. Use of the term ‘demo-legitimism’ rather than the term ‘populism’ may foster a more open debate on democracy.