Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism. Kurt Weyland . (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

The term 'populism' has gained consistent usage in both the political science literature and in the everyday language of politicians, the press, and daily interactions between citizens.Kurt Weyland's book is a significant contribution to the terminological understanding of the concept, its implications in democratic regimes, and the particularisation of certain characteristics according to territorial context.Examples such as Latin America, Europe, and the United States are used in the work to highlight tendencies towards charisma, nostalgia for past regimes, or economic nationalism.Going beyond the 'traditional' traits associated with populism (anti-elitism and the division between the people and the elite), the author proposes a tempered approach to the inevitable path towards the death of democracy (as noted by a significant number of researchers).According to him, causal relationships should not be analysed solely based on descriptive case studies but require a comprehensive view of populist leadership patterns.The generalisation of results is thus made possible by systematising the damage done to democracy by populist leaders, in tandem with certain favourable internal conditions (eg institutional fragility).Given these contexts, the magnitude of the changes occurring in democracies is difficult to standardise and, even more so, difficult to make uniform in terms of impact, duration, and contributing factors.Consequently, the legitimacy given to populists through voting, as Weyland points out in the seven chapters of his book, is not an exclusive prerequisite for catastrophic scenarios for democracy.The author develops his argument by referring to crucial factors and conditions such as opposition adherence, institutional stability, and the sustainability of the rule of law.Their deficiencies or shortcomings allow, through circumstantial opportunities, the maximisation of the destructive power of populists within the political system.The comparative frameworks proposed by the author, in examining Latin America, Europe, or the United States of America, nuance the explanatory dynamics by highlighting the structural differences and commonalities of populist manifestations.In addition, to reduce the scale of catastrophic scenarios for democracy, Weyland brings to the fore a topic of interest to readers: the survival of populists in contexts of electoral failure.Whether they were forced to relinquish power (eg Igor Matovi's resignation as prime minister of Slovakia) or the electorate did not grant them the necessary mandate to govern (Andrej Babi in the Czech Republic in 2021), the situations mentioned above highlight the predisposition of populists to suffer defeats, in some cases even irreparably.Drawing a parallel between populism and risky political strategy, Weyland focuses his study on analysing populists from the last four decades to determine the feasibility of the threat to democracy.The characterisation of populist leaders, inherently influenced by local political issues, their comparison, and the assessment of their impact all lead to the author's positive view of their effects on democracies.