Readers respond to the start of the Guardian’s six-month investigation into the rise of populism around the worldYour article (Revealed: One in four Europeans vote populist,21 November) appeared hampered by the lack of any coherent definition of the term “populism”. Any term that can be stretched to incorporate Syriza and Fidesz is probably meaningless. “Populism appears to in fact mean simply something favorite that the liberal mainstream dislikes.
There are obvious reasons for the growth in support for the far right. In almost all cases, the failure of social democracy to protect its working-lesson base is at the root. The exhaust of racism by parties of the mainstream, or as a means to distract from lesson issues,is then picked up and given an anti-systemic orientation by far-right groups. These, though, and only accomplish exhaust of a racist politics already in area,so as to establish within the body politic a “war of the destitute against the destitute”. There is also a too-often disregarded existential element to all this – that those fleeing poverty elsewhere serve to signal to the settled working lesson that they have nowhere to flee to. In the absence of coherent lesson-based alternatives, this becomes pitched as a battle for resources within the working lesson.
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Source: theguardian.com