Delivered. The 2010s will have been those of the return of the people to the forefront of the political scene. The people of the Arab revolutions, that of the democratic uprising in Hong Kong or even the citizen revolts that have marked the decade, from the “indignados” of Puerta del Sol in Madrid to the “yellow vests”. But there is another people who have held the front of the stage, it is the one invoked all the time by populist political leaders who never cease to flatter their worst instincts, identity and nationalist, to agitate their fears for better seize power. Either way, the people were defeated. This is the bitter observation drawn by Pierre Blanc and Jean-Paul Chagnollaud in their book, The Missed Meeting of the Peoples.
The interest of their book is to connect these two popular movements, those resulting from hope and those born from resentment, to mirror them. The former aspire to democracy at a time when the latter no longer believe in it, particularly following the 2008 crisis which shook the very notion of social progress. Apparently, this dichotomy opposes a “South” which has not yet emerged from autocracy, to a “North” having lost faith in its values and worried about its loss of identity.
But this apparent opposition is not so unequivocal. The demand for democracy is not the prerogative of the Arab world, even if it was the “spring” of 2011 that brought the notion of revolution back to center stage. He set a model, that of citizen and peaceful revolutions, without a leader: a formidable force at the peak of mobilization but without recourse when it comes to proposing a model regime or facing repression. In the West too, democracy can be an aspiration and an ideal, as the uprisings in Ukraine in 2014 and Belarus in 2020 prove.
No linear continuum
As for the “South”, it is not immune to populism: President Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Prime Minister Modi’s India or President Erdogan’s Turkey are good examples. Nothing prevents those who have not experienced democracy, or who have only just tasted it, from falling into populism, like President Kaïs Saïed’s Tunisia. Conversely, populism can lead to a democratic surge, as was the case during the last American presidential election.
History is not a linear continuum leading from autocracy to democracy before descending into populism. The end of religions in the West and then that of ideologies have given way to a void conducive to “beliefs”, which are easier to manipulate.
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