What Do Populist Authoritarians Do When They Rule?

Kamal Mitra Chenoy (kamalchenoy@gmail.com) is a retired professor, Centre for Comparative

Politics and Political Theory, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi.

In the times of the generalised ascendance of right-wing populism, it is necessary to have

comparative view of right-wing governments and parties. Such an exercise would help discern
common patterns of the ideological programme and political practice of these forces.

The strategy of mobilising people on the basis of economic and cultural anxiety, and constructing
identity-based nationalism to gain power is described variously as majoritarian nationalism,
populist authoritarianism or right-wing populism (RWP). Populisms by nature are centralising, even
within democratic systems. When violence is used to achieve these agendas, it slides into site-
specific fascist tendencies. Right wing populists or ethnonationalists hold office in many countries
the world over (United States [US], 11 European countries, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Philippines,
Brazil, Ecuador, etc). They are a formidable opposition and can influence policy in others. RWP is
not uniform or new, but a complex phenomenon, with historical roots known best after the World
War I economic crises. Currently, the turn to the right is so sharp, that left liberals, political
centrists, neo-liberals and important conservatives from Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Madeleine
Albright all warn of the rise of fascism (Albright 2018). RWP coexists with any form of state from
totalitarian to liberal democratic, as they make state institutions subservient to their control (Burley
2017). This article offers a comparative template of RWP’s methods of rule.

There are a concatenation of forces and crises in social, economic, political and cultural life
combined by populists to reject the liberal order, social justice and traditional elites. One major
factor that has exacerbated right-wing authoritarianism is neo-liberalism. With pressure on living
standards, citizens tend to look for reasons to diminish anxieties. This disquiet and fears of a
weakening economy, cultural invasion by the “different” and security threats, are in most cases
taken up by RWPs. The RWP argument is that subsidies to the poor, especially migrants, people of
colour, Muslims (who are all generally citizens), the entry of women into job markets, are actually a
drain on the national economy, due to which the majority of people suffer.

The reality is that RWPs have no plans for tackling growing inequality, jobless growth and socio-
economic crises. It is historically established that variants of fascism are built on inequality, and the
belief that society should be ordered like that. Since RWP cannot tackle inequality, they reorder it
instead. The goal is to replace existing class inequality with identity-based inequality. Thus making
migrants, minorities, women and different others who are already on the margins, the new, more
excluded and poor. So while populism is a consequence of social crises, RWP is the response to
crises that essentialises identity, fans threats of cultural invasion, disrupts traditional values and
rejects pluralism. Inequality is central in the RWP project. But it can also be the reason for its
defeat.

Political Project

The RWP’s project is to gain hegemonic power by changing the character of the state, institutions
and citizenship (Polychroniou 2018; Shivji 2019; Vanaik 2017; Jaffrelot 2019).

It involves restructuring the balance and division of power which is the core of democratic
constitutions. Readers of international media know that the RWPs from Presidents Donald Trump,

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Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor
Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others centralised state power
by controlling their cabinets, disregarding elected representatives, dividing the judiciary. Each one
places trusted loyalists as heads of institutions, regardless of their expertise. For example, Erdoğan
through a referendum took on extraordinary powers that give him complete control over the
cabinet, the power to appoint senior officials and judges, and pass decrees with almost no oversight
from Parliament.

RWPs destroy potential sources of power, often beginning with a coup in their own party, where
challengers and potential leaders are marginalised. Putin constructed the United Russia Party in his
own image. Modi marginalised the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) traditional leaders like L K
Advani, M M Joshi, and others. Trump uses his son-in-law Jared Kushner as the main foreign
policy negotiator, and so on.

RWP can subvert any form of political system, from democratic to authoritarian. Described by Cas
Mudde (2004) as a “thin and host ideology,” populism combines with others, including socialism,
ecologicalism, etc. The experience of living under the Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte and Bolsonaro
regimes and engaged scholars shows that populism is moralistic and not programmatic, focuses
around a strong charismatic leader, who directly communicates and makes claims in the name of
the people. Their concept of “people” is restricted to one dominant identity, whilst others are seen
as threats or not deserving of equality. RWP does not recognise the humanity of “others” or the
different (Burley 2017; Muller 2019; Cohen 2018). So RWPs recreate and order society on this
basis. Political theorists have argued before that the concept of “the people” remains contested as to
how composite these are and who actually represents them. However, RWP differs from other (left
or centrist) populisms as it essentialises a dominant identity, targets a minority, depends on myth-
making and rejects pluralism.

Modalities of Ruling

For building a right reaction RWP focuses on changing common sense through a nationally
reconstructed menu. Some of its contents are as follows.

This includes a fusion of exclusive identity assertions where one ethnic community or one version
of religion is made synonymous with the nation, presented as “exceptional” but also under
perpetual threat, to be safeguarded by national security. So certain other sections of the population
live under fear and threat.

The RWP project first marks “outsiders,” then mocks and dehumanises them. Jaroslaw Kaczyński
of Poland’s most influential party PIS described migrants as carrying “various parasites and
protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but which could be different here” (Diehl 2015). The
BJP’s Amit Shah called Bangladeshi migrants “termites” (Hindu 2019a). A known neo-Nazi,
Slovakia’s President Marian Kotleba refers to the victimisation of the majority of Slovaks by
“gypsy criminals” (Walker 2019b). RWP leaders through Europe have replaced anti-Semitism with
the threat of migrants, which in reality is a fictitious threat, and which cannot resolve the economic
or social crises.

The discriminatory narrative of RWP translates into policy, as the following select examples show:
Trump’s “big beautiful” wall and talk on the insecurity caused by unknown Middle Easterners;
Bolsonaro’s praise for the genocide against Native Americans and his first executive order putting
agribusiness interests in charge of indigenous reserves; Italian deputy Prime Minister Matteo

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Salvini’s proposal for economic curfew on the shops owned by “ethnic communities” claiming
these people were unclean; andIndia starting the National Register of Citizens that excludes four
million Muslims from one state of Assam alone.

Countries governed by the RWPs witness a rise in vigilante and mob violence as binary and hate
narratives endorsed by leaders give sanction to supporters and create material and legal conditions
for impunity. In the Philippines, all opposition, including the many bishops, the communists, human
rights defenders and liberals are clubbed together with drug dealers if they oppose Duterte: “These
(critical) Bishops, kill them, these fools are good for nothing. All they do is criticize” (Heydarian
2019). Duterte ordered “shoot to kill” any suspected drug dealer, and later threatened activists with
the same fate. Trump remarked he would “like to punch protestors in the face and offered to pay the
legal fees of his supporters who did” (Jost and Hunyadi 2018). Lynching of people on unverified
allegations like beef eating, went up in the last five years of BJP rule, replacing the traditional
“communal riots” in India (Jafferlot 2019). These stories could go on.

RWP hates liberals, the left, and liberal rights. Putin stated “I hate liberals”; Prime Minister Modi
said: “If Left liberals had treated the Ganga as mother, no one would have polluted it” (India Today
2019). Hungary’s Prime Minister Orbán focuses on hating and despising liberals and centrists.

The attack on liberalism is accompanied with control over education and critical ideas. The severe
attacks on liberal campuses like Jawaharlal Nehru University and others exemplify this. The
Bolsonaro government plans to revise textbooks, excise references to feminism, homosexuality,
curtail research in sociology, philosophy and gender studies. Bolsonaro said in his campaign that he
wants to “Enter the Education Ministry with a flame thrower to remove Paolo Freire” (Hindu
2019b). Slovakia’s Marian Kotleba wants references to human rights and tolerance out of school
syllabi and proposes that beauty pageants be held in schools. Bolsonaro stated he would
exterminate the left. In Turkey Erdoğan oppressed thousands of intellectuals in different ways. This
hatred arises because RWP fears that dissent can delegitimise charismatic leadership and challenge
myth. They consider it necessary to deny earlier given liberal rights on the pretext that this
dismantles future growth, challenges national security, threatens the construction of purity of
identity and traditional family values.

The toxic masculinity of Trump, Duterte and Bolsonoro is legendary. RWP signifies the strongmen
image and despises women. Orbán opposes birth control, advocates that women will get to pay no
taxes if they produce more children so that native Hungarians are not “mixed with those others”
(Walker 2019a). President Duterte normalised rape: “No one wants to do it on the first try. That is
rape,” and that there would be rape as long as there were beautiful women (O’Grady 2018).
Bolsonaro called women “idiots” and “as unworthy of rape, leave alone equal pay” (Philips 2018).
Turkey’s Erdoğan speaks regularly against women’s equality and rights as going against nature,
legislated new marriage laws, arguing that “our religion (Islam) has defined women for
motherhood.” Putin said “I do not have bad days like women” and then diluted the criminalisation
of domestic abuse. Several RWPs leave misogynist speech to lesser party leaders but are complicit
in their silences, making masculinity a reference point. Feminists argue that this discourse regulates
women’s bodies as a resource for national development. It must be added, however, that the
populist agenda can accommodate women’s equality but not aspects of race, class, and difference
(Emejulu 2017). Several RWPs target the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Bolsonaro says a dead son is preferable to a gay one. Therefore the real strategy to counter them
needs an intersectional alliance and solidarity.

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RWPs seek legitimacy by referring to their “own gods” and mythical interpretation of the past
rather than through people (Burley 2017; Shivji 2019). They love to use technology but fear
science, and want to end social science. Brazil’s foreign minister called climate change a Marxist
plot. Erdoğan insists ancient Turks had a mission to the moon, Prime Minister Modi has stated that
pre-ancient India had plastic surgery and so on. In Romania, Poland and Hungary, the governments
refused to reassess their past histories and roles in xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Ukrainian
President Víktor Yushchenko legitimised ultra-nationalists and groups supporting war criminals.
The agenda is to create a narrative of past greatness and current victimhood by manipulating
historical memory. As RWPs rewrite history and ignore its lessons, the worst in history can recur in
different ways.

The Populists work by capturing and controlling institutions (Vanaik 2017). They neutralise an
independent judiciary by controlling appointments, subject courts to executive or military
intervention, delegitimise judicial decisions. For example, Erdoğan reassigned 3,000 judges and
chief prosecutors, sacking one-third of the judges and prosecutors who could be independent
(Times, 27 July 2018). In one decree, Erdoğan scrapped the need for administrative judges to have
any legal training, giving himself powers to appoint judges according to his ideology and support
base. Slow court procedures are used as punishment for dissent in India, Philippines, Egypt and
Turkey. RWPs are known to reinforce draconian laws to punish dissenters through prolonged
judicial processes.

RWP infuses militarism into civilian life. Bolsonaro appreciates the hated dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet, champions unrestricted sales of firearms, argues that police encounter killing is self-
defence. Duterte told soldiers in martial law areas that they could rape three women without
punishment, and “it will be on me” and he asked soldiers to shoot female rebels “in the vagina”
(Ellis-Peterson 2018). Vigilante forces are seen as a natural ally and rogue policemen encouraged,
thereby justifying state-supported violence on the enemy other. This discourse and practice
normalises violence against minorities, dissenters, women, or anyone who differs.

Possibilities of Resistance

We have argued that the RWP method is that of challenging all socially necessary liberal and human
rights, undercutting these to weaken laws, and diminishing public funding, to reject a plural,
multicultural, egalitarian, and open-ended society. So, resistance is to reverse this. Of course this
depends on the depth of democratic culture and rainbow coalitions in each country.

A major force fighting right-wing authoritarianism and populism have been the liberals. Not
surprisingly, the RWP ruling strata and its intellectuals co-opt some liberal ideas, especially by way
of economic benefits targeted for dominant communities. Further, some erstwhile liberal theorists
and activists are also co-opted to serve the state’s interests. A problematic issue is that of the liberals
who take their philosophy seriously, but under peer pressure and the general intellectual climate, are
neo-liberal in the economic sphere.

A number of dominant and powerful leaders have openly rejected liberal ideas. This is a pure case
of ruling regimes considering liberal tenets to be a threat to their control of the state and public
institutions. This contestation for public common sense is prolonged and bitter. In this scenario it is
evident that in a number of countries the theoretical, ideological, and political struggle against
right-wing authoritarianism and populism based on sectarian nationalism has been inadequately
fought. However, the getting together of secular democratic political parties and forces, mass
demonstrations, the fightback by independent media, farmers, women’s movements, civil society,

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intellectuals, bishops and others in countries governed by RWPs from Poland, US, India,
Philippines and others, show that there are forces in democratic societies where a large measure of
liberal values still prevail.

For the poor and marginalised, mobilisation and countering populist propaganda are a must. For
this, marrying of the rights discourse, political tolerance, liberal democracy social and ecological
justice, and anti neo-liberal economics is the critical conjuncture that can turn the tide. Mobilisation
and popularising freedom from fear and want that can come with popular power and rights can
counter the fear of authoritarian populism.

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Updated On: 17th Jun, 2019

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