How to look at the current populism in Europe

Populism emphasizes the values and ideals of the common people, and regards populism and popularization as the ultimate legitimacy of political movements and political systems; relying on the common people to reform society and making them the decisive force for political reform; By emphasizing such as the unity of the civilian population.

1. Populist values such as referendums and people's right to create have effectively controlled and manipulated the common people as a whole.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greek crisis, where policymakers are inexperienced and faced with the three mountains of populism, narrow nationalism, and politicization of economic issues, politicians are often held hostage by short-term public opinion, locked into political procedures, and afraid to break through ideological constraints.

Populism refers to the political and economic ideas that populists espouse. The idea upheld the control of politics by the commoners and opposed the control of politics by elites or aristocrats. In a political system that claims to be popular sovereignty, politicians always claim to "represent" the people, and thus in the most basic sense of the word, they are "populists".

Populist promises have changed the public's welfare expectations, increased their dependence on **, and relaxed their resolve to struggle, which is a corrosive agent with extremely negative effects. The fatal problem is that when the welfare expectations of the masses are not met, the social psychology quickly reverses and a strong climate of contempt for authority, rejection of change, and hatred of the successful develops. At the same time, excessive fiscal indebtedness and welfarism beyond the earning capacity have correspondingly become a habit, and this habit has interacted with the people, and its destructive power has been fully reflected in the European debt crisis.

The basic meaning of populism is to answer the question of its extreme populist tendency, that is, to place extreme emphasis on the values and ideals of the common people, and to regard populism and popularization as the ultimate legitimacy of all political movements and political systems, so as to judge the development of social history. It opposes elitism and ignores or abjects the important role of political elites in the historical development of society.

One can define populism as an ideology according to which legitimacy is in the will of the people, and therefore it embodies radical democratic ideals. This populism corresponds to direct democracy, which is characterized by democratic extremism.

1. The goals pursued are different.

2. Right-wing populism often attributes the root cause of social problems to a certain part of the system or innocent groups, and usually carries conspiracy theories, such as the Nazis blaming the Jewish capitalists for social problems, etc., and the effect is often to find a scapegoat for the social and political system or even strengthen the oppressive system.

3. Left-wing populism demands the overthrow and transformation of the entire system, or at least the reform of the system, to alleviate social contradictions.