Representing the people

We need now to move from talking like the people to speaking for the people, that is from rhetoric to representation. The distinction is of course analytical, as form and content can never be completely separated in the analysis of discourse but at the heart of populism is a claim to speak for the people that needs to be further explored. In an impromptu speech after he had won the primary election for the presidency of the Frente Amplio Mujica (2009b) captures the formal and substantive elements of political representation that I am seeking to discuss here: “Se lo que represento dentro del Frente Amplio y dentro de esta sociedad que construyo arquetipos. Hay un negro en Estados Unidos, un indio en Bolivia y sin odio lo digo, que el pais sepa que represento a los que vienen bien de abajo.”

Most definitions of populism emphasize the populist leader’s direct appeal to the people as the “underdogs” or, as Mujica put it, as those “at the bottom of society”. As we know, however, it is not easy to establish whether a direct relationship between the leader and the people actually exists or what precisely it entails. A leader’s direct appeal to the people is obviously more likely to be possible in weakly institutionalized political systems, in which there are few mediating political structures between politicians and their addressees. However, even in countries with relatively strong and stable representative institutions, particularly those with presidential systems, citizens directly identify themselves with political leaders beyond or above the parties they belong. A case in point is Lula da Silva, whom in the 2006 election won almost 60% of the popular vote, while his party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) polled just around 20% of the vote. In the US only a relatively small percentage of the citizens identify themselves as supporters of one of the main parties, meaning that any successful presidential candidate must have the ability to directly appeal to a majority of independent electors. Conversely in Argentina the Partido Justicialista (Peronista) has been a mediating structure in the relations of Peronist populist candidates of different political leanings and the Argentinean people.

What I think is characteristic of populism is not so much the direct relationship between the leader and the people but the leader’s ability to reach to those who regard themselves as having no voice in the political system. Who are these “voiceless” underdogs? To put it in slightly simplistic terms they are those who suffer from economic, social or political exclusion or at least who regard themselves as such. I would suggest therefore that “speaking for the people” combines both the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. As we know “the people” is a political construct that does not necessarily coincide with socio-economic categories. But in a region that has the highest levels of socio-economic inequality in the world, the poor are truly at the bottom of society and any claim to represent the underdogs should seek to improve the lot of the poor and draw electoral support from them. In many countries of Latin America electoral preferences have become increasingly defined by socio-economic cleavages with the middle classes voting for established politicians and the poor voting for political outsiders. The trend to socio­economic electoral polarization has been reinforced by the implementation of targeted social programmes and other welfare benefits that have consolidated the links between leaders (now as presidents) and the people, from Chavez’s misiones to Lula da Silva’s bolsa familia. In the case of the later, social programmes have been an important contributing factor in the significant shift in his electoral base of support from the urban progressive middle classes and the organized working class of the state of Sao Paulo industrial belt towards poor voters in the relatively less developed areas in the north and north-east of the country (Hunter and Power 2007, Zucco 2008), reviving the old Varguista image of the President as “the father of the poor”. In the case of Uruguay, in which the FA government has implemented similar social programs, the political implications of this shift was encapsulated in Talvi’s argument about the new welfare-dependent constituency of populism of the uneducated and the unemployable and in Mujica’s pointy reinterpretation of the argument in terms of “ un tercio de la poblacion que por falta de education no sirve para nada, solo aspira a que el Estado les de todo y por definition votan a quien tiene pinta de ser bueno para hacer llover dinero publico sobre sus cabezas”. In a more sophisticated way the relation between populist representation and economic benefits is elaborated by Kurt Weyland’s (2007) argument that redistributive struggles for the appropriation of rents from commodities are at the heart of the populist revival in Latin America and iterated with a different normative charge by Joseph Stiglitz’s (2006) rather throwaway remark that “if by populism one means worrying about how the bottom two-thirds of the population fares, then populism is not a bad thing.”

The identification of “the people” as the poor and its corollary, the importance of the politics of redistribution for understanding populism are important aspects of populist representation in contemporary Latin America and raise a number of questions about the relations between political and economic populism. Economic benefits and appeals to the poor alone, however, do not account for populist representation. Representation is about giving voice and recognition to the political excluded, as much as about giving economic benefits to those excluded from the socio-economic system. Throughout the history of Latin American populism the politics of recognition has marked the irruption into the political scene of hitherto subordinated popular urban sectors. Carlos de la Torre captures early examples of the politics of recognition in Ecuador when he reminds us that José Maria Velasco Ibarra introduced mass politics into Ecuador, partly incorporating previously excluded people into the political community. As he put it “[h]e [Velasco] democratized public spaces by bringing politics from the salons of the elites to the streets. His followers who were for the first time addressed in the public plazas, asserted their right to occupy public sites...” (1994, 689, emphasis added). A similar plebeian irruption still resonates in Argentina’s political imaginary with reference to the mythical occupation of Plaza de Mayo by the workers of the periphery of Buenos Aires on 17 October 1945.

The politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution went hand in hand in the rise of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia. The importance of the redistribution of oil rents is attested by his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party campaign for the rising of the oil and gas companies’ royalties paid to the state and by subsequent confrontations between the central government and the gas and the resources rich “half-moon” provinces of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija over the allocation of hydrocarbon rents. But while the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution can seldom be completely separated, the campaign for the recognition of the cultural, political and social equality of Bolivia’s indigenous majority was a dominant feature of Morales’ political appeal. It is striking from reading Morales’ speeches to note how they are dominated by moral and political universals: “dignity”, “equality”, “sovereignty,” “justice,” “liberation”, rather than by strictly economic issues. The reason for this emphasis lies, according to Morales’ (2006) inaugural speech, in the history of cultural and racial discrimination, political exclusion and economic exploitation of Bolivia’s indigenous majority: “Los pueblos indigenas -que son la mayoria de la poblacion boliviana () Estos pueblos, historicamente hemos sido marginalizados, humillados, odiados, despreciados, condenados a la extincion. Esta es nuestra historia; a estos pueblos jamas los reconocieron como seres humanos, siendo que estos pueblos son los duenos absolutos de esta noble tierra, de sus recursos naturales.”

In the case of Venezuela there is no question of the importance of high oil revenues in explaining Chavez’s popularity (Coronil 2008b; Hidalgo 2009, Riutort 2007; Weyland 2007). There are also strong arguments for claiming that Chavez has mismanaged oil revenues and that his economic policies are unsustainable in the long term and may ultimately undermine his social base of support. Legitimate questions can also be asked as to whether his social policies are addressing the underlying causes of poverty and exclusion in the country or effectively perpetuating them (Penfold Becerra 2007, Riutort 2007). What is important to question, however, is the crude economicist account of popular support for Chavez, as the exclusive result of social handouts that bribe the poor into supporting him. If political conflict in Venezuela in the 1990s and 2000s was just to be defined by struggles about the distribution of oil rents it is unlikely that it would have lead to such a radical rupture of the political order as represented by the Bolivarian revolution. A full account of Chavismo requires focusing on its political elements as much as on the economic ones. As Julia Buxton (2009, 2) put it, “In 1998 Chavez was not elected on a left-wing platform, promise of economic re-distribution or because he pledged to confront neoliberalism Crucially, Chavez was elected because he promised to create a completely new form of democracy, a qualitatively distinct model of institutional and constitutional organization and a new type of political engagement for Venezuela’s citizens.” Thus, the initial definition of Chavez foundational project was Bolivarian rather than socialist. Chavez drew from the populist tradition the notion of a virtuous people rising from a long period of oppression in a never ending struggle for social justice and from the military tradition the notion of himself as a selfless patriot willing to sacrifice his own self interest and well-being for the people of his country (Capriles 2008, 9).His political discourse is aimed at making his followers feel that they are participants in a long-running struggle for the liberation of the Venezuelan people in the same way that Miranda and Bolivar, together with the people of Venezuela, two hundred years ago, liberated Venezuela from the Spanish yoke (Zuquete 2008, 102).

Дата добавления: 2015-07-10