Religion, politics and populism: the State of Israel’s Democracy

In a previous paper we explored the relationship between populism and religion in Israel, analyzing two populist parties: Shas and Likud. We showed the different role of religion for both parties. While in Israel, religion functions both as the positive content of the political community (the ethnos––the Jewish people—is conflated with the demos); and as the marker of a threat (non-Jewish citizens, asylum seekers, and allegedly disloyal secular elites); Shas emphasized the first role, and Netanyahu’s Likud the second. In the present paper we analyze the evolution of the interrelation between populism and religion in both parties, as it takes place in the current government. We analyze how religious values, tropes and sentiments feed the definition of “we the people”, the opposition between the “true” people and the elites, the justification of the government’s promotion of non-liberal conceptions of democracy (changing the relationship between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary power), and policies related to “family values”.