The populist discourse as a symptom of a crisis of the powers

Abstract

Power breaks in numerous ways, subdued to a greater dissenting social demand. Ideologies are interfered by discourses which appeal at the same time to the individual right to emancipation and to the social group right to be recognize by its identity characteristics. What we call populism is one of the clues of the power instability of our time known as postmodern and postcolonial. Populism is not a political regime. It is based on a discourse that pretends to represent the people without mediations, by handling values which make up a system. However, the people, or at least a part of it, expect strong values, and even claim them. The analysis of populist discourse must bring face to face the discourse of political leaders and the discourse of the social demand to observe how it creates an interference of ideologies. This is what the article demonstrates by reviewing the ideological matrix of right and left discourses, by confronting the themes of populist discourses which echo a particular social demand, and by explaining how this ideological interference is produced, and also the emergence of discourses (sometimes of governments), which pretend to respond to the popular sovereignty causing the collapse of government parties, either left or right.