ABSTRACT
Does a populist lens of analysis help or hinder our understanding of Fiji’s two most significant politicians, the indigenous military strongmen and repeatedly elected prime ministers Sitiveni Rabuka and Voreqe Bainimarama? Both leaders used populist-like speech and behaviour to advance their careers. Yet Fijians rarely describe them as populists. A populist lens accurately identifies these leaders’ parallel rhetorics of ‘the people’ versus a malign other as politics of charisma and crisis, but in other ways it clearly misses. Appeals to popular sovereignty and strategies of mass mobilization were marginal to these two leaders’ initial seizure of power. Alternative accounts for such ‘populist’ behaviour, then, might stress Fiji’s own cultural logics of authority, or how in small population states (i.e. >1,000,000) an illiberal, personalized, and policy-lite politics can stem from a country’s size alone. Indeed, nostalgia for a more proximate politics may be a crucial feature of ‘populisms’ in general.
