 |
|
Halting the March of the Populist Juggernaut on Global Theatre The political horizon across America and Europe is suddenly shifting. Recent electoral fiascos – most notably Vučić’s dramatic defeat to a grassroots student movement in Serbia, and Flávio Bolsonaro’s narrow runoff defeat to Lula’s win in Brazil – following hard on the heels of Viktor Orbán’s historic downfall in Hungary, suggest that the authoritarian populist juggernaut is finally losing momentum. However, this global narrative cannot be fully understood without examining its darker, more unvarnished manifestations. The recent US intervention in the Honduran presidential election – where the Trump administration deployed economic coercion and dangled a controversial pardon for convicted narco-trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández to secure a conservative victory – stands as the ugly climax of Trumpism (the American avatar of authoritarian populism): a raw, imperial exercise in foreign meddling that lays bare the movement’s utter contempt for democracy and sovereignty. To understand why these global defeats matter so profoundly – and what they signal for systemic strongman politics everywhere, including the world’s largest democracy, India – we must turn to the diagnostic clarity of political theorist Jan-Werner Müller. In his seminal book What is populism? (2017), Müller cuts through the rhetorical fog to identify the defining pathology of the populist project: “The core claim of populism is a moralised form of anti-pluralism. Populists-in-power are always engaged in building a state for themselves; they treat critics and opposition not as legitimate adversaries, but as treasonous elites or tools of foreign corruption.” As Müller explicitly notes in his diagnostic framework, the mechanics of this internal decay are structural: When we apply Müller’s framework to the recent reversals in Belgrade, Brasilia, and Budapest, alongside the heavy-handed strongman theater in Honduras, a compelling picture emerges: the populist spell is breaking because citizens are recognising that the moral monopoly claimed by these leaders is an absolute fraud. The anatomy of collapse To grasp the magnitude of this shifting tide, one must look first at Hungary, where Orbán – the grand godfather of illiberal democracy whom American and European conservatives long treated as a lodestar – was unseated after 16 years of ironclad rule. Orbán perfected the art of constitutional engineering, capturing the media, and rewriting electoral laws. Yet, as Müller notes, populists often fall victim to their own hubris: “Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities.” When economic fatigue and public exhaustion with institutional decay finally punctured the fantasy of perpetual grievance, Orbán’s fortress crumbled. The shockwaves quickly rippled through Europe and America. In Serbia, Vučić’s decade-long dominance abruptly collapsed when a leaderless, galvanised grassroots student movement pulled off a stunning electoral landslide. Across the Atlantic, Brazilian democracy held the line against the Bolsonaro family brand. Yet, where electoral defeat has not yet unseated them, the global right has resorted to desperate, coercive overreach. The Honduras presidential episode serves as a textbook manifestation of the ugliest dimensions of Trumpism: weaponising foreign aid threats, engineering an “electoral coup,” and trading justice and anti-corruption standards for political alignment. It proved that when populist networks feel threatened globally, they will gladly resort to blackmail and external meddling to keep themselves afloat. What it means for India? What do these global dominoes falling – and the desperate, clawing overreaches of declining strongmen – significantly mean for India under the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi? For years, critics have viewed India’s democratic backsliding as part of the very same global populist wave that birthed Trumpism, Orbánism, and Bolsonaro’s brand of majoritarianism. Modi’s governance model has long pioneered a unique fusion of cultural majoritarianism and targeted economic distribution – what political analysts describe as labharthi (beneficiary) politics – which uses state resources to keep marginalised or precarious populations dependent on basic subsistence largesse while systematically narrowing the definition of the “true citizen” to exclude religious minorities and dissenters. The unraveling of populist icons abroad sends three vital, sobering signals to India’s political ecosystem. Just as Orbán and Vučić appeared permanently entrenched until public exhaustion caught up with them, the fall of global populist icons shatters the myth of political invincibility. It proves that no matter how thoroughly a ruling party captures state institutions or rewrites the rules of engagement, economic stagnation, youth disillusionment, and grassroots mobilisation can eventually breach the fortress. The Honduras episode demonstrates how declining or aggressive nationalist movements behave when cornered – turning to raw coercion, external meddling, and institutional hollowing. For Indian democracy, watching international strongman politics flail serves as a reminder of how high the stakes are when governance becomes entirely transactional and personalised. In Serbia, students bypassed paralysed traditional opposition parties to reclaim the public square. In Hungary, a united democratic coalition finally cracked an uncrackable system. For India’s fractured opposition and beleaguered civil society, these global shifts offer a clear lesson: authoritarian majoritarianism cannot be beaten by timid, reactive maneuvers; it requires deeply rooted, imaginative public mobilisation and a refusal to accept democratic erosion as irreversible history. The democratic re-awakening The march of the populist juggernaut is being halted not by technocratic complacency, but by a renewed democratic imagination. As Jan-Werner Müller observes, civil society and citizens everywhere are realising that the nation-state does not belong to self-anointed tribunes who claim exclusive ownership of the public identity. The fall of Orbán, the ousting of Vučić, and the global exposure of Trumpism’s extractive, desperate mechanics send a clear, unmistakable message across continents: populism is loud, disruptive, and destructive, but it is ultimately fragile. As the myth of the invincible strongman evaporates from Budapest to Belgrade, the democratic world – and nations watching from the Global South like India – are offered a rare, hard-won window to repair their institutions, restore civic trust, and prove that open societies can still deliver a future worth believing in. https://thewire.in/world/halting-the-march-of-the-populist-juggernaut-on-global-theatre Back Faisal C.K. is deputy law secretary to the Government of Keralam. |
 |
||||||
|
|||||||