Representation facing Populism, Anti-Populism and Anti-System Political Field: Triangle Polarization as an Indicator of Tensions in Central Europe Societies

Populism, often described as an ideology or strategy representing the pure people against corrupted elites (Mudde, 2004; Weyland, 2001), models its own political space, including the logic of campaigns and representations. It is usually incompatible with traditional goals of political extremes (Arzheimer, 2009; Bjørgo & Ravndal, 2019) and generates the counter-field, conceptualized as anti-populist (Hamdaoui, 2021; Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2019; Havlik & Kluknavska, 2022). Populist and anti-populist spaces enter the political landscape with differentiated activities including, but not limited to, unique forms of political participation at the citizens' levels. This paper focuses on a particular stage of this process, political mobilization. Political mobilization is determinative for various subsequent political activities (Cameron, 1974; Castelli Gattinara & Froio, 2022; Hansen, 2016). Using data on protest events and affective polarization and protest-event-analysis (PEA) tools to generate a descriptive ground, the paper proceeds to connect the PEA findings with the analysis of survey data on affective polarization. Case selection includes several cities in Czechia and former DDR, with similar experiences with economic transformation and a strong presence of populist activities (Brunner, 2018; Volk, 2022), during the period of overlaying crises characterized by dynamic political changes (2019-2022; Bosch & Durán, 2019; Guasti, 2020) enables the identification of common & specific features of political mobilization in the time of populism. The research contributes to conceptual clarifications of populism/anti-populism cleavage and enriches existing databases with data about recent protest events.