ENACTING POPULISM

An on-going project on the possible relationships between art practices and the populist mediascape that connotes the current political zeitgeist of Europe
«I think that the prospects in today’s Western Europe are rather unpleasant. All the governments in Western Europe are reacting to the crisis with extreme neoliberal formulas of adjustment. Zapatero has just passed a set of draconian measures and you know what is happening in Greece. In Germany the situation is also relatively unsustainable, and in England the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron is quite feeble because there exist strong tendencies within the Liberal Democrats to reject the coalition agreement and the way it is implemented. So the situation is bad, and this all the more because the social democratic parties, which are the only viable alternative at the moment in Eastern as well as Western Europe, do not have any alternative plan. These conditions fuel extreme right-wing populism. If you don’t have an alternative to the system, people who feel a need for such an alternative move to extreme ideologies, wheter they are right-wing or left-wing. Take the example if France. There existed a classical discourse of opposition, which was that of the Communist Party and the red belts of the industrial cities. This world has disintegrated as a result of the tertiarization of the labour market. The outcome was a unique system of ower in which the social democrats and the more conservative forces did not differ very much from each other. The only political alternatives were to be found on the fringes of the left and right, yet it is the right fringe that has progressively expanded. Many former voters of the French Communist Party are today voter of Le Pen, a phenomenon thart is called gaucho-lepénisme. The reason is simple: if you want change in some way, the precise way om which that change is going to happen and its ideological framing become a seconday matter. And that is of course not only the situation in France. The chances for a left populism are today in Western Europe rather minimal. Populism is going to expand, but it will be a populism of the right.” Ernesto Laclau, excerpt from an interview by Rudi Laermans, appeared on The Populist Imagination, Open magazine no. 20, Nai Publishers, 2010

«I think that the prospects in today’s Western Europe are rather unpleasant. All the governments in Western Europe are reacting to the crisis with extreme neoliberal formulas of adjustment. Zapatero has just passed a set of draconian measures and you know what is happening in Greece. In Germany the situation is also relatively unsustainable, and in England the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron is quite feeble because there exist strong tendencies within the Liberal Democrats to reject the coalition agreement and the way it is implemented. So the situation is bad, and this all the more because the social democratic parties, which are the only viable alternative at the moment in Eastern as well as Western Europe, do not have any alternative plan. These conditions fuel extreme right-wing populism. If you don’t have an alternative to the system, people who feel a need for such an alternative move to extreme ideologies, wheter they are right-wing or left-wing. Take the example if France. There existed a classical discourse of opposition, which was that of the Communist Party and the red belts of the industrial cities. This world has disintegrated as a result of the tertiarization of the labour market. The outcome was a unique system of ower in which the social democrats and the more conservative forces did not differ very much from each other. The only political alternatives were to be found on the fringes of the left and right, yet it is the right fringe that has progressively expanded. Many former voters of the French Communist Party are today voter of Le Pen, a phenomenon thart is called gaucho-lepénisme. The reason is simple: if you want change in some way, the precise way om which that change is going to happen and its ideological framing become a seconday matter. And that is of course not only the situation in France. The chances for a left populism are today in Western Europe rather minimal. Populism is going to expand, but it will be a populism of the right.”

Ernesto Laclau, excerpt from an interview by Rudi Laermans, appeared on The Populist Imagination, Open magazine no. 20, Nai Publishers, 2010

  1. pablocalderon reblogged this from enactingpopulism
  2. enactingpopulism posted this