THE NATIONALPOPULIST MUTATION OF NEOLIBERALISM Dr. Gábor Scheiring ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow 2018–19
P
opulism and neoliberalism are among the most fiercely debated topics in the social sciences—however, the two concepts have produced two disjoined discourses. The conventional approach to populism followed by most economists and political scientists has characterised it as a threat to the neoliberal order, a cultural backlash1 against cosmopolitan globalization, describing populist leaders as opposed to business elites and liberal economic principles.2 Businesses are, in turn, frequently hypothesised to oppose populism. When populists get elected, they are described as reckless political entrepreneurs openly breaking with liberal norms and erecting populist regimes imbued with state capitalism. In short, the conventional approach to populism hypothesises that populist regimes lead to a clash with most businesses and a divergence from liberal capitalism. In contrast to the conventional approach to populism, neoliberalism scholars, mostly sociologists, historians, and social anthropologists, have been more skeptical about the supposed clash between rightwing, nationalist populism and neoliberalism. In a path-breaking piece of research on Peru’s Fujimori, Kurt Weyland has shown that populism 1. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge 2019: Cambridge University Press). 2. Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards, “Macroeconomic Populism,” Journal of Development Economics 32, no. 2 (1990). 15
