The populist turn: a comparative study of three decades of populism in Italy

Public Defence of PhD Thesis by Simon Cecchin Birk.

Assessment Committee

  • Professor Morten Rievers Heiberg, Chair (University of Copenhagen)
  • Professor Daniele Albertazzi (University of Surrey)
  • Associate Professor Susi Meret (Aalborg University)

Moderator of the defence

  • Associate Professor Georg Wink (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of the Library of the Faculty of Humanities, Karen Blixens Plads 7
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond), Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1
  • At the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies Emil Holms Kanal 6

 

On a late September evening in 2019, I had an aperitivo with two long-time friends of my family at an outdoor bar table in Verona’s historical marketplace, Piazza delle Erbe. While sipping his Spritz, Chiara’s husband Ivano lamented the state of journalism in Italy. As he stressed, one could no longer trust the leading newspapers as they were all in the hands of the same powerful people. The only newspaper that he occasionally found worth reading was Il Fatto Quotidiano. It covered corruption and other abuses of public office in the mainstream parties such as Partito Democratico, which traditional newspapers, including la Repubblica, tended to downplay or ignore, he explained.

I remember thinking that it was no coincidence that the newspaper led by the notorious Marco Travaglio also happened to be the newspaper closest to the protest party that Ivano had voted on in 2013 and 2018. I also concluded that it was no accident when he used la Repubblica and Partito Democratico as examples. After all, he had loyally read the former progressive and now more centrist newspaper and supported the centre-left party and its predecessor for years. As a middle-class public servant, he had always leaned left, and he still had a “peace” rainbow flag hanging from the window above the front door of his house. Like many Italians, Ivano had also always been highly sceptical of his country’s political class. Over the last decades, he had become deeply disenchanted. “Nothing changes”, as he put it that evening, “you understand, we keep electing politicians that are all the same, politicians that are only thinking about their career”.

Conversations such as the one I had with Ivano have helped shape my view on populism. They have left me unconvinced by descriptions of the phenomenon as nothing more than superficial rhetoric or strategy adopted by demagogues in pursuit of power. Instead, they have made me gravitate toward explanations that start by viewing populism as a set of ideas. To be sure, these can be appropriated. However, they can also be part of a coherent political outlook wherein elites conspire against the people, depriving them of their voice and status. While it has a great capacity to mobilize the masses, it could also have a more profound imprint on political action. Thus, this dissertation will follow the logic of populism and examine its most important manifestations during the last three decades of Italian politics.