The populism of populism in Italy and Philippines (E251)

The Italian government, already in trouble over its budget with the EU, is the personification of populism: a hybrid of left and right working together on a populist programme. In Hungary, Poland, and many other European countries, lines of left and right are being blurred. The pre-eminent theorist of this phenomenon is Professor Matthew Goodwin of the University of Kent. He is also an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House and the author of a new book ‘National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy’. So, we invited him into the Sputnik studio to help us understand just what is going on.

For decades, the Philippines was a classic confrontation between a spendthrift strongman pro-American dictator President Marcos and his powerful and extravagant wife Imelda from the one hand and a powerful pro-Chinese communist insurgency from the other. The dictatorship fell. Cue a national populist leader President Rodrigo Duterte – not much of a liberal, but he would call himself a democrat of a different kind. Orion Perez, the founder of “the CoRRect Movement” of the Philippines and a leading campaigner for radical change, is on a European tour to rally support amongst the substantial expatriate Filipino community. He found time to come into the Sputnik studio to tell us more about this potentially powerful Southeast Asian archipelago.

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