Of Matteo Carnieletto

Source: The eyes of war
It is easy to say that populism is absolute evil. A sort of fascism of the new millennium to be eradicated. Right, in today's populist movements there are hints of extremism, sometimes even racism. But you cannot understand how these movements are succeeding around the world without understanding their causes. The deepest ones and those that have created discontent among the people who then go to the polls and decide who to reward (to punish).
In an interview with Il Manifesto, the well-known activist Noam Chomsky had his say, sparing no one, especially the American left: “In the USA many workers voted for Obama, believing in its message of hope and change, and when they were quickly disillusioned, they looked for something else. This is fertile ground for demagogues like Trump, what an end to being the voice of workers while undermining them time after time through his administration's anti-union policies, who represents the wildest wing of the Republican Party”. Here Chomsky is right about the first part, but wrong on the second, given that under Trump the lowest unemployment rate has been recorded since 2000.
But Chomsky's speech also flows when he talks about austerity and the Troika that they brought, thanks to the condescension of the traditional parties, “to anger, to frustration, to fear and scapegoating". And that's exactly what has happened since Brexit. The vote against the European Union was first and foremost a protest vote. A vote against more or less absurd constraints. And the same with Donald Trump, which represented the breaking of years of political correctness. And also the success of the last months of the League in Italy. Just take a look at its leader's tweets, Matteo Salvini, to realize that he gets the greatest number of "likes" when he attacks Brussels.
But not only that. In a few hours we will know the results of the vote in Sweden. It's in this country, which for years was lulled into the dream of social democracy, that something can change. Polls indicate the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a populist movement that some accuse of having within it fringes close to the neo-Nazis. How come? Because its founder – Jimmie Akesson – was good at exploiting the country's real problems: first of all the poor management of the migration phenomenon. In the last five years, Indeed, over 160 thousand migrants would have reached Sweden. And the country's welfare system has obviously suffered as a result: “There are no numbers, in balance sheets, to offer all foreign citizens the same protections as Swedish citizens, just as it is difficult for diametrically different cultures to coexist", as we wrote on Gli Occhi della Guerra. And we could go on with the examples, talking about Viktor Orban's Hungary, really, of Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines, the lonely man who also challenges God.
Populists represent the wrong answer to the right questions? Can be. But continuing to turn a blind eye to discontent with Brussels means giving populists the chance to govern for the next hundred years.