Populisme ? Apports et (més)usages d’un concept pour comprendre les gouvernements nationaux-populaires latino-américains

Abstract

Since the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998 and in the context of the South-American “progressive cycle” over the last 15 years, the academic, militant and journalistic use of the concept “populism” to analyse the subcontinent’s reality has experienced an unprecedented renewal and generated many debates within social and politic sciences. Furthermore, many authors and essayists have used it for normative purposes and to disqualify some processes intended to upset existing social hierarchies and political systems. Symbol of crisis, convulsions, and democratic disenchantment, the invocation of populism has raised exponentially over the five continents : yet, is there a Latin-American specificity for this political practice ? What similiarities and differences between the populisms of the 1930s and the recent national-popular experiences (starting with chavism) ? What are the contributions of this analytical framework (particularly in the wake of the theories by the argentinian thinker Ernesto Laclau) for understanding the role played by these charismatic figures in the mobilization of the “people”, their ambiguous relationship to representative democracy or their rhetorical denunciation of the United States ? Also what misuses, limits and political instrumentalisation of the label “populism”, often regarded as disgraceful ? At a time when the historian Alain Rouquié describes the XX century as “the century of hegemonic democracies”, the increasingly extensive use of this notion allows for a questioning from a critical and comparative point of view.

Keywords

• Latin America
• populism
• Ernesto Laclau
• chavism
• critical theory