Why so much Hatred? The Normative Reasons for Populists’ Disdain for Compromises

Political theorists working on populism frequently note an aversion to compromise on the part of populists. The negative relationship between populism and compromise is presupposed in their studies, but is rarely analyzed in detail (Abts and Rummens 2007, Urbinati 2019, Pappas 2019, Mudde 2021). In this paper, we offer a comprehensive and systematic account of the reasons behind this oft-repeated conflict between the populist ideology and the practice of compromise, disentangling the various dimensions of such incompatibility and exploring their connections. We seek thus to identify what is distinctive about populist objections, bearing in mind that they are not the only ones to vehemently oppose compromises in politics. To do so, we rely on major recent theoretical works on populism, on empirical findings concerning the ideational approach to this phenomenon, and on Baume and Papadopoulos’s (2022) typology of objections against political compromises that singled out five general grievances to compromise. The paper shows that the populist objections partly overlap with those inventoried by Baume and Papadopoulos, notably along the moral and antagonistic dimensions. However, the pluralist objection is completely reversed, since populists criticize compromises for undermining the people’s political homogeneity. As to the objections of inconsistency and inequality, which also appear in Baume and Papadopoulos’s (2022) typology, we find that they are marginal in the populist corpus.