Fare e disfare il popolo. Un’ipotesi sul caso italiano

In the current context of the populist explosion which is spreading across Euro­pe, the US and all over the world, Italy is the only western country that has been experiencing, for thirty years, four different kinds of populist politics, from both the side of the government and the opposition: Northern Lega’s ethnic populism, Silvio Berlusconi’s telecratic populism, Matteo Renzi’s institutional populism, Five Stars Movement’s Web populism. This article analyses therefore the «Italian aboratoryl» as a case study which shows the reconfiguration of the whole political field as a populist one, where the new populisms arise on the ruins of the sovereign demos undone by the neoliberal governmentality. Comparing the main interpretations of populism as a shadow, a symptom or a spectre of democracy, the author wonders moreover if the populist strategies may be in Italy a wake-up call to address the crisis of representation or are rather doomed to widen the gap between the people and the political and economic oligarchies. Finally, the article discusses whether Ernesto Laclau’s «populist reason» can be considered really as the straight way toward a radical democracy or is compromised by the centrality that it bestows to the leader’s role, which in turn, in western democracies, is reshaped, by the mass-media system and by post-oedipal modes of subjectivation.