Paraphrasing Karl Marx, a specter is haunting Latin America—the specter of “populism.” This label has been attached to a wave of radical left leaders in the region, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The term is normatively charged. The Mexican politician and scholar Jorge Castañeda contrasts radical populist leaders (such as Chávez and Morales), whom he characterizes as less convinced of the intrinsic value of democracy and human rights, with moderate left-wingers (such as Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay), who embrace representative democracy and respect human rights.Footnote 1
This division of the Latin American left between “good” social democrats and “bad” populists is open to challenge. But Castañeda is right to draw attention to the fact that democracy and populism are engaging with similar challenges of political order. Moreover, it is important to recognize that democracy and populism also have compatible normative grounds, both seeking to enact the sovereign rule of the people. Nevertheless, democrats and populists diverge over how to respond to such challenges as how to manage majority-minority relations, safeguard individual rights, and establish a just and enduring political order. The coexistence of these two political logics within Latin American societies generates significant political fault lines, reflective of the incomplete nature of democratic order in the region.
THE NORMATIVE BASIS OF POPULISM
In everyday parlance, populism is a term of abuse, denoting a dangerous malaise of the body politic. Populist leaders are said to be authoritarian demagogues who appeal to the emotions of the electorate in order to gain their support, pandering to prejudices and resentments to turn voters against the established political order. They have little regard for democratic institutions and procedures; they tell the people what they want to hear without consideration of the long-term political and economic consequences.
This view has been challenged, however. Some scholars reject the notion that the populist label adequately represents the governments of Chávez and Morales; others, while agreeing that these governments are populist, nevertheless welcome the transformative—indeed, democratic—potential of giving voice to the ordinary people who feel excluded from the established order. Margaret Canovan, by no means an apologist for populism, reminds us that many so-called populist leaders favor “direct democracy”—that is, political decision-making by referendum and popular initiative. As she rhetorically asks, if notions of popular power and decision are central to democracy, “why, then, are not populists acknowledged as the true democrats they say they are? How is it that they can be often seen as dangerous to democracy: all the more dangerous, indeed, in so far as they get popular support?”Footnote 2 Indeed, democracy and populism share common normative ground: on Michael Kazin's definition, populism is a mode of persuasion available to any political actor operating in a discursive field in which the notion of the sovereignty of the people and its inevitable corollary, the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, are core elements of its political appeal.Footnote 3
A focus on the normative basis of populism allows a richer understanding of its appeal to the people, and in particular to those members of the demos traditionally excluded from full enjoyment of political and social rights. As indicated above, part of the normative content of populism is its emancipatory promise. Populism in this sense marks a “rupture” with the existing unjust order and the “reconstruction” of a truly democratic order. In this new political order, the plebs (the underdogs) defeat their oppressors and become the demos (the legitimate holders of sovereignty), and are thereby able to exercise their democratic rights.
But the fact that populism and democracy share a common normative ground does not mean that populism is necessarily democratic and that the political logic of populism cannot be deeply problematic for democracy. The unrestricted exercise of popular sovereignty and the conception of the people as a homogenous collective actor leave little room for the protection of individual human rights. The antagonism between the people and their oppressors that characterizes the political logic of populism can potentially justify the exclusion or even the prosecution of those members of the political community considered “enemies of the people.” And because populism's emancipatory promise is inevitably an ever-receding horizon, the fight against these “enemies” can even lead to the politics of permanent revolution.
While democracy shares with populism the normative principle of the sovereignty of the people, it also shares some of populism's distinctive dilemmas regarding majorities, minorities, exclusions, and safeguards. As has been recognized for a long time, at least since John Stuart Mill, democracy has been haunted by the threat to liberty posed by the unrestricted exercise of majority rule, to the detriment of minority rights. Liberal democracies have addressed this danger through constitutional liberalism, understood as the entrenchment of the balance of powers, the primacy of the rule of law, judicial review of executive decisions, and enforceable minority rights. The principles of constitutional liberalism act as a corrective to the dangers of pure majoritarian democracy in at least two fundamental ways: (1) they establish that certain fundamental rights (such as the right not to be subject to torture or other forms of degrading or inhuman treatment) cannot be abrogated by the will of the majority; and (2) they subject the decisions of democratically elected powers to the rule of law and make courts the guardians of the law.Footnote 4
The populist vision and the constitutional-liberal tradition that characterizes liberal democracy thus differ on how to manage their similar dilemmas—how to conceive of the holders of sovereignty, and how to organize political representation. In contrast with populism's representation of the sovereign people as a collective actor constituted through relations of antagonism with the status quo, constitutional liberalism represents the sovereign people as individual citizens interacting in a plural political environment that accommodates political differences yet also allows the negotiation of interests. While populism blurs the public-private divide by advocating the unmediated participation of the people, according to constitutional liberalism, political participation is exercised mainly through the mechanisms of representative democracy. While populism stresses the collective rights of the people, constitutional-liberal discourse emphasizes the importance of individual rights, checks and balances, and the toleration of differences. While populism's collective representation of the people crystallizes in the figure of the (populist) leader as the one who “speaks for the people,” constitutional liberalism privileges the role of public institutions over that of officeholders and emphasizes the importance of these institutions in shaping and limiting political life.
POPULISM IN PRACTICE: THE CASE OF LATIN AMERICA
The democratic wave in Latin America that started in the early 1980s has been the longest and most encompassing in the region's history. However, some of the high hopes raised by the process proved premature and short-lived. While no country has seen a return to military rule, the quality of democracy in the region has generated a mood of disappointment, reflected in public opinion surveys and academic writings. Two interconnected factors lie behind this public disillusionment. The first is the institutional fragility of the democratic order, evident in the weakness of the rule of law, the politicized nature of the state, the lack of political accountability, and the discrediting of parliaments, political parties, and other representative institutions. The second is the persistence of historically high levels of socioeconomic exclusion, aggravated by the free market reforms of the 1990s.
The appeal of populism in the region should be understood with reference to past and present political dislocations. Unmet social needs and heightened economic insecurities, for instance, provide raw materials for the articulation of political grievances. In populist discourse these problems are represented as the result of a political order dominated by traditional political parties unwilling or unable to address the demands of the people and, equally, a neoliberal economic order that excludes significant sectors of the population from its benefits.
Thus, such leaders as Chávez and Morales created a political divide between the people on the one side and, on the other, the political supporters of neoliberalism—that is, the traditional parties or partyarchy. These leaders presented political messages that contained a double promise: not only to break with the political and economic status quo but also to refound the political order by setting up inclusive and participatory institutions and a more just economic system.
The divide between people and partyarchy was embodied in the public images of populist presidential candidates. These figures campaigned as political outsiders who did not always play by the rules of the game, or made their own rules. The personal histories of Chávez (as the leader of a failed military coup in 1992 in Venezuela), Morales (as the leader of the coca growers in Bolivia), and Correa (who, while running for president as head of a loose political movement, refused to present candidates for Congress in the 2006 presidential and congressional election in Ecuador) served as reminders of the political gap that separated these candidates from the institutional order represented by traditional politicians.
Evo Morales—the 2005 presidential candidate of Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party—for instance, constructed a multidimensional divide between the people and the traditional elite. Morales built a narrative that ascribed an imaginary unity to the disenfranchised people of Bolivia—particularly those coming together in mass protests against the privatization of gas and water (a part of the neoliberal project); the coca growers prevented from cultivating the “sacred leaf” by the interference of an external power (the United States); and the indigenous peoples suffering from over 500 years of political, economic, and cultural exclusion.Footnote 5 By jointly articulating the dangers of neoliberalism, foreign intervention, the control and appropriation of natural resources, and millennial exclusion, Morales legitimized his populist, political rupture with the country's entire social order, history, and institutional heritage.
The assertion of collective grievances and symbolic unity, exemplified in the Morales campaign, is a political operation. Such assertions require the homogenization of highly heterogeneous social groups with divergent interests and multiple identities. They can be successfully articulated, however, by such leaders as Morales, who was able himself to become the nodal point of popular identities. In other words, the imaginary unity of a heterogeneous people can be represented if the leader serves as a kind of blank canvas—a surface for the inscription of the desires, affections, and demands of diverse popular actors.Footnote 6 While political leadership is of course central not only to populism but to other democratic movements, relations between the leader and the people under populism are of a different nature than in other political traditions, and, taken to the extreme, render this aspect of populism incompatible with democracy. As Benjamín Arditi notes, the centrality of the leaders and their direct rapport with the “common man” transform populist leaders into something akin to infallible sovereigns; their decisions unquestionable because they are theirs.Footnote 7
Chávez's presidency, meanwhile, illustrates the tensions between the populist and constitutional-liberal political visions currently at play in another Latin American nation. In a constitutional democracy such as Venezuela, the leadership of a president is restricted by the institutional position and temporary nature of the office. Periodic elections signify and enable the distinction between the presidency (as a permanent office) and the current officeholder (its provisional occupier). Chávez's quest for indefinite reelection (which was, admittedly, submitted to the popular vote in December 2007) revealed the tension that can therefore result between the constitutional-liberal framework and a populist project, both of which are at the heart of Venezuela's contemporary politics.
Whereas a populist leader can claim to be the leader of the plebs above all, his office makes him the leader of the whole demos, including the supposed “enemies” of the people. How the leader/president negotiates this chasm is of the essence for the democratic process. Chávez, for instance, is the leader of the Bolivarian movement but also president of all Venezuelans; in performing the democratic balancing act that results, Chávez must decide whether to acknowledge his “enemies” as legitimate members of the demos. If he chooses to deny the possibility of mutual recognition between his supporters and adversaries, the president will thus perpetuate the antagonism characteristic of populism.Footnote 8 Chávez's selective use of the law to harass political opponents, his political demonization of opposition candidates, and the use of state resources to favor government supporters contrasts with his tolerance for largely fraud-free elections and attest to the still ambiguous nature of his political strategy.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL MOMENT IN LATIN AMERICA: POPULISM'S EMANCIPATORY PROMISE
The establishment of constituent assemblies in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela embodied populism's emancipatory promise, where, having defeated their oppressors, a sovereign people sets the foundation of a truly democratic order. (Constitutionalism, indeed, is at the heart of the republican tradition—with its roots in the French and American revolutions—that inspired the movements for independence and constitutionalism in Spanish America.) A constitution enshrines the sovereignty of the nation and the supremacy of institutions over those who temporarily make them operative. It also ensures the historical unity and continuity of a nation beyond political divisions and changes in the constitution's content. At the same time, a constituent assembly represents a moment of radical democratization through the people's unmediated exercise of popular sovereignty: as members of the constitutional assembly, the plebs can at last aspire to become the demos. The people's political authority is legitimized by the radical investiture of sovereign power in the constituent assembly, unbounded by any other legitimate source of political authority. The people thereby have the right not only to decide the electoral and decision-making rules for the assembly but also to determine the rules of the new political order, without necessary regard for precedent, convention, or tradition.
As illustrated by the conflicts that characterized constitutional reform in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, the promise of a new democratic order based on the rule of fully reconciled people proved ultimately to be an illusion. The hope was to close the chasm between plebs and demos by making those excluded by the previous orders—indigenous groups, peasants, the urban poor, ethnic minorities, and other groups—full members of the political community. But political battles over the rules of the constituent assemblies, their composition, their terms of reference, and the majorities required for the approval of constitutional dispositions revealed the chasm rather than concealed it. These battles also highlighted the problems that populist leaders face in negotiating the tension between the principle of the primacy of institutions and the notion of the people as the unrestricted holder of sovereignty.
It is thus not surprising that, for instance, in Bolivia the assembly set up to reconcile the people and refound the nation became instead the focus of deep division and discord. The issues at stake in Bolivia's constituent assembly revealed the tensions at the heart of populism's emancipatory claims: (1) What does a break with the past mean in a democratic context? (2) How do you define “the people”? (3) How do you reconcile the political divisions between majorities and minorities in the new demos? The Bolivian assembly faced particular questions as to whether claims for regional autonomy by the conservative opponents of MAS should be regarded as democratic demands (and therefore as part of the process of constituting a plural demos), or whether the country's autonomist movements were to be viewed as the expression of an unreconstructed other, alien to the people and a threat to its unity. Recent agreements reached by President Morales and a majority of opposition leaders, ratified by popular vote in January 2009, allow at least for cautious optimism that the new order will be based on a broad political compromise.
The fault lines between populism and democracy in Latin America today reflect the incomplete nature of democratic order in the region. By giving voice to popular grievances against the status quo, populism can under certain conditions contribute to the renewal and enlargement of democracy. In Bolivia, for instance, Morales embodies the genuine aspirations of ethnic groups and other popular sectors to have their voices heard in the political realm. But the voice of the people can never be equated with the voice of the leader, and the populist rupture with the status quo should not signify a rupture with the basic principles of democracy. In this regard the concentration of power in the executive and the lack of consideration for checks and balances—as in Chávez's Venezuela—cannot be justified by a leader's claim to speak for the people. If democracy is about the enactment of popular will, its survival depends on acknowledging that the will of the people can never be fully enacted. Moreover, because there can be only contested versions of who the people are, including who has the right to speak on their behalf, we only ever have provisional versions of popular sovereignty; therefore, the argument for the toleration of differences is not only a liberal argument but a democratic argument as well.Footnote 9 For all the weaknesses of democracy in the region, the citizens of Latin American countries have so far vigorously exercised the democratic right to choose their leaders and to throw them out of office when they are found wanting. It is in the interest of the people to retain this right, even against those who claim to speak in their name.
