Rupture, institutionalisation and tension: About populist temporality in Latin America

Abstract

Amidst the global political context in which populism had become a key word, the Foundation of Urgent Spanish declared populism the word of the year 2016. Not surprising considering that Spanish is the most widely spoken language in Latin America, region that has a long tradition of populist politics and that, by then, was finishing a renewed populist wave that had even impacted in Spain with the rise of Podemos. Spanish-speakers could increasingly listen how the term was used in different public spaces: in the media "political analysts" used the term mostly uncritically and pejoratively to label any political experience that distanced itself from the model of neoliberal oriented representative democracy; politicians started using it as an insult to degrade their opponents and within the academia, students, professors and researchers witnessed how it became (once again as it had been before regarding the period of great populisms of mid-twentieth century) the predominant issue of debates in humanities and social sciences, particularly in political science and political theory.