Politics and Unpolitics: Different Forms of Populism

This paper looks comparatively at how unpolitics is and is not employed by different actors. The paper starts with cases of contemporary populist regimes including Law and Justice in Poland, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India. The argument is made that some populist regimes may display anti-institutional elements where they both confront existing aspects of their states ideologically but also engage in reforms designed to both embody an anti-institutionalism and to be a practical means of restricting constraints on their power. These typically might be constitutional reforms, judicial reorganisation or attacks in civil society or the free media. But this does employ unpolitics as the other strategy of these regimes will be to offer direct benefits to would-be supporters in order to shore up and extend their support – in short, to use standard political tools and appeals. Such regimes are not pulling on unpolitics. In contrast, the paper considers actors such as Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro and how they have operated in ways that mobilise and use unpolitics. The paper also looks at where other political actors, such as Milei in Argentina or Grillo in Italy, may be considered to display elements of unpolitics, although not the same extent as the three cases in the book. The paper therefore suggests that unpolitics offers one way of usefully differentiating between types of populist actors.