ABSTRACT
Introduction Until the 1980s, a reference to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries – the Narodniks – that were close to ‘the people’, was used by political scientists in their definition of populism, referring predominantly to various Latin Amer ican regimes (such as Vargism in Brazil and Peronism in Argentina), to the People’s Party in the USA and, eventually, to post-colonial states. In post-World War II Europe, the definition of populism was reserved for a few marginal political phenomena scattered in various countries: Poujadisme in France, Uomo Qualunque (Common Man’s Front) in Italy, Finnish Rural Party (Suomen Maaseudun puolue) and the Progress Party (Fremskridspartiet) in Denmark and Norway. From the 1980s onwards however, a large and growing number of European movements, parties and leaders have been labelled ‘populists’. Having shifted from the academic discourse to the core of the political debate and being regularly evoked by the media as a major issue of our time, ‘populism has become popular’.1 As the Italian sociologist Ilvio Diamanti (2010: 6) writes:
Populism is one of the words that is most used in the political discourse for some time now. Without much difference, however, between the scientific environment, public, political and everyday life. Indeed, it is a fascinating concept, able to ‘suggest’ without imposing too much precise and definitive meaning. In fact, it does not define, but evokes.
