La rhétorique démocratique populiste aujourd'hui : entre spontanéisme et néo-bolchevisme

Abstract

International audience ; For a long time, in France, its first « homeland », as in Latin America from 1945, populism has been connected with democracy, in an ambivalent or ambiguous relationship. Populism can be understood as the disposition of political action to polarize, to simplify and to emphasize antagonisms; for democracy always carries in her the seeds of crisis. The vote in favor of populist organizations is then often lived as a re-appropriation of political decision by those who no longer feel represented by the major parties. Democracy becomes then in populist speech, a vector of affect. The populist appeal to democracy, which we could qualify as « counter-performative », undoes the democratic consensus of representative government provoking polarization and tension, and aims at legitimized violent action. Now, if in the past, the live discourse of the leader was decisive for giving substance to mobilization, today, the mobilizing discourse is at the same time more diffuse and more scattered: populist discourse is self-constitutive and auto-occurs as a hegemonic standard of reference. The populist dynamic shapes characters according to the necessities of the moment and each can then shop in his populist market, choosing such or such a leader-idol on the world stage and changing according to the humors and the situation. Political « lapses » and populist « excesses » all fall within the framework of Justicialist demands (centered on an abstract, immediate and total ideal of justice, and based on a deep and widespread resentment). Another structuring « populithema » of democratomorphic populism is indeed the notion of « impunity ». Used at first in the context of the question of the bringing to justice of the crimes of dictatorships, the notion of impunity extends to economic crimes and more generally, spreads to underscore the privileges of the powerful. When it evokes imperialism and post-colonialism, contemporary populism, posing as a redresser of wrongs, uses fewer economic arguments than a vague ...