We have to be very careful because we are not a socialist or populism party. Populism believes in leadership who believe they are special and they are the hope and above all rules or laws or standards. They believe they can dismantle any institution as long as it serves what they believe to be the greater good….
We are a centre right party. The centre-right commonly supports ideas such as
Populism starts out by targeting elites with a real intention of creating their own rival elites to support their agenda politically
- A hard core belief in strong independent well resourced institutions because these institutions shape the direction of economic growth and protect the rights of all citizens
- Populism creates a society of Oligarchs …Conservatism creates a society of Many strong businesses of many sizes
Populism believes in leadership who believe they are special and they are the hope and above all rules or laws or standards. We believe in rational government backed by strong institutions
Populism creates a state where the populist govt gets to pick winners and losers regardless of Ethics, standards or merit. Those who win also have no responsiblity to the state but rather are loyal to certain individuals
Conservatism practices Responsible capitalism where those who are successful are mandated to invest in their communities
- Populist dont believe in the free Market economy. They rather believe in a manipulated economy
- Populist do not belief in the rule of law or Govt regulations if they belief it doesnt serve their interests
- Conservatives belief in adhering to Govt regulations only if to control monopolies or cartels or especially if they promote fair competition
- Populist do not believe in the rule of law hence they do not belief in private property rights, …Conservatives are committed to the rule of law and protecting one’s individual and property rights
- Populist believe in a largely welfare state. Conservatives believe in a limited welfare state (for example, government provision of education and medical care) because we believe majority of state resources must be channeled to the creating a level playing field in all areas and an enabling environment for the success of the indigenous private sector
- law and order
- freedom of religion,
- strong national security.
The centre right ideology has historically stood in opposition and veyr much against to radical politics, redistributive policies, populist politicians, multiculturalism, immigration, and LGBT acceptance.
Populism succeeds when we fail to communicate our principles and live by them….it leads to a failure on the part of the party people to take responsibility for their individual actions that have contributed to our overall plight….
In Ghana, Populism…which is what NDC practices starts with “the creation of an enemy ie fulanies, Asantes, etc with the revisiting of old scores attempting to justify the animus towards these groups. If you check oral it targets Akans and excludes Northerners and Voltarians
Secondly, “the characterization of NPP as an internal national enemy in the form of casting our political system as responsible for creating an exclusive poltical elite who are responsible for all the peoples problems is their forte. Here the populist work to control and subvert majority of the institutions like the various media outlets, the Judiciary and civil service.
A third element was the offering of outlandish promises to the electorate, “not to decrease but to increase salaries and pensions”, increase cocoa farm gate prices, remove all taxes. Populist speak in hyperbole and lie shamelessly with no intention of any accountability
“The final tactic was the seeding and widening of social divisions, “a we-and-them” approach which left no middle ground, “no space in the political centre”, with the aim also of “delegitimising” and demonising their political opponents.
The problem with populism
The voters do not or may never catch on until late in the day, akin to the frog in the pot that is now well and truly boiled…Because like a False or Fake Prophet, they tag on your raw emotions and leave no room for deep analysis or circumspection
Populist political regimes usually end badly, sometimes in violence, sometimes with a whimper, nearly always in economic calamity and social division, exactly what they purportedly set out to eliminate. The problem with populism is not that it promotes ideas rather, it is bankruptcy of ideas but rather seeks to repackage ideas of others and name them as their own. Populism’s flaw is partly in method, given that populist politicians make claim to represent virtue in a struggle against a tainted vice ridden elite; that the ends thus justify the means to all tearing down of institutions meant to protect the populace from the effects of the harm that they have so well described
Anna office in her Athens’ Diktio think-tank is virtually next door to the gates of the ancient city of Athens, midway between the 800 metres separating the Acropolis and the Pnyx, the site of the Athenians’ popular assemblies and one of the earliest forms of democracy, not far from Syntagma Square, the epicentre of the modern capital.
The square around the Greek Parliament was a battleground between police and rioters in a series of demonstrations and strikes in 2010 and 2011 against government plans to cut public spending and raise taxes in exchange for an international bailout to solve the country’s ldebt crisis. The centre-left Pasok and centre-right New Democracy parties, which had traded power for more than 40 years, became the political scapegoats as power shifted to the extremes.
Diamontopoulou, a minister in two socialist-led governments and before that the EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, said back then that Greece was definitively in the throes of a populist moment.
“While we had prosperity over the last 40 years, since the end of the military dictatorship in 1974, the political system was still immature, and our institutions still superficial, despite our entry into the European Union. Notice the reference to week institutions
“This, plus a failure on the part of the Greek people to take responsibility for their own plight, created” what she describes as “the perfect landscape for populism”.
Four traits, she says, define this shift, which has seen a collation of the far-right Independent Greeks (Anel) and the Coalition of Radical Left (Syriza) – a party of former student activists and far-left intellectuals that had hitherto struggled to win more than 4% of the vote – win power in the January 2015 election.
“First,” she says, “the creation of an enemy outside wrt to those who are German sympathisers with the revisiting of old scores from World War II, attempting to justify the payment of debts in the form of reparations.
Second, “the creation of an internal enemy in the form of the previous political system and the economic elite”, where the government sought to wrest control of the state media.
A third element was in the offering of outlandish promises to the electorate, “not to decrease but to increase salaries and pensions”.
“There were,” she notes, “no limits to anything”. And the final tactic was the seeding and widening of social divisions, “a we-and-them” approach which left no middle ground, “no space in the political centre”, with the aim also of “delegitimising” and demonising their political opponents.
She is joined in this assessment by Thanasis Bakolas, a strategist for the leader of the opposition, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, of the centre-right New Democracy movement.
“Greece is the first country [in Europe] to be embroiled with and taken over by the forces of populism.” The country is, he notes, “a textbook example of a populist regime”.
“You have a party of the radical left in a coalition with the populist right, a symbiotic relationship which has become the strongest in Greek politics bound not by ideology or a plan, but simply by their quest for power.”
They got into power, he says, because Greeks were in a “state of trauma, shocked and angry that their pensions were cut, that they had lost their jobs, that their way of life had been disrupted”.
“The political dialogue, which had never been of the highest state anyway, deteriorated further, giving rise to a populist government whose aggressive message had appeal to a people who were hurting,” Bakolas says with a smile.
Defined as a response designed to appeal to ordinary people who feel ignored by established elites, rather than liberate, populism usually ends up servicing a new elite intent on excluding rival political voices and economic claims, capturing the state for their own purposes.
This is especially notable among contemporary left-wing regimes, those which adopt a Gramscian “hegemonic” strategy, gaining control over the economy to exercise political leadership over the “subaltern class”. In the case of President Lula da Silva’s Brazil, for example, this included the co-option by the state of big business in a series of messy corruption scandals epitomised by Operation Car Wash, where Worker’s Party apparatchiks colluded with the very oligarchic elites that they once criticised.
Populism.is about state capture and in the case of JDM, his tarhet is the mining sector especialy gold and if his indirect “state capture” fails to deliver, there they will continue to resort to more direct means, including preferential funding for political supporters to capture state concessions, intimidation, repression and even violence. Our Democracy will continue to slip to authoritarian democracy and unless confronted then, inexorably, wnd up in tyranny.
This populism of this “new left” will not, however, liberated the masses, no matter the sincerity of their intentions. It simply entrenches a new, different elite. Just ask the Venezuelans fleeing the empty shelves in their homeland in their millions across the border to Colombia, a result of a deadly combination of populism and socialism.
Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, have proven what Uri Friedman describes as “textbook populists”. Their policies — which included price and currency controls, nationalisation, and party control of food distribution — set the stage for cronyism, corruption and collapse.
Such collapse is a result of the short-term thinking and impulses which drove the election of populists in the first instance. This lends itself to stimulating growth through redistribution rather than attempting to manage deficits, balance budgets, temper political promises and manage inflationary pressures. The result: runaway inflation and crisis as social popularity trumps economic logic and short-term spending shades long-term investment. In the case of Venezuela, the country ran budget deficits even at the peak of its oil boom in the 2000s.
Chavez and Maduro are not alone. This trend is apparently most notably in the personality and words of Donald Trump. As the contender noted in his campaign:
“We are going to put America first, and we are going to make America great again. This election will decide whether we are ruled by the people, or by the politicians.”
Such language reflects, in part, some of the great economic disruptions that these economies, particularly developed ones, have had to cope with, from increasing automation, robotics and labour cost competition. According to the World Economic Forum, for example, the real wages of most US workers have not budged in real terms in decades. Today’s average manufacturing hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long decline in the 1980s and inconsistent growth since.
Such stresses and strains are coming inevitably to other geographies.
Populism remains alive, if not so well, in the “new left” regimes in Latin America, including those of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, the ruling Marxian Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and his neighbour Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.
Until the election victory of Mauricio Macri in Argentina in 2015, populism ruled through the Peronist regimes of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. And then there is a rise of the populist right, including Brazil’s president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, the Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte, governments in Poland and Hungary, and, of course, in Trump.
The appeal of populists grows with mounting public discontent over the status quo, which is exacerbated by fears over economic security and terrorism. Certain politicians, notes Kenneth Roth of Freedom House, flourish in this environment, scapegoating “ Elites, other ethnic groups, refugees, etc,”. As a consequence, he reflects: “Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, and religious phobia’s are on the rise.”
But there are two different sorts of populism, and we do ourselves a disservice by lumping them together. There is one guided by “normal” politics, and another where populists seek to alter the constitution and place themselves at the centre of power, hanging on by whatever means possible, including authoritarianism.
In the case of the former, that of robust politicking, basic civil rights, including equality before the law and freedom of expression, it retains constitutional legitimacy and protection. Such is the case, for example, in the US.
In the case of the latter “constitutional” variant, the populists see themselves as the voice of the disenfranchised, as expressing the will of the people. This is what JDM has been doing.
As Chavez declared ahead of the 2006 election:“You are not going to elect Chavez really, you are going to re-elect yourselves. The people will re-elect the people. Chavez is nothing but an instrument of the people.” aka Mahama is the Hope….
It is difficult to live in a democracy when it’s not headed by democrats. Populists, whether left- or right-wing, can damage liberal democracy and its rule of law and checks and balances on executive power. Instead they believe in the power of elections and referenda, promoting a brand of politics that denigrates their opponents as “enemies” or “evil”, as Diamontopoulou notes, operating against the people and contrary to the will of the majority.
With every peceived crises they taeae at democratic institutions. This includes rolling back media freedoms, as in Venezuela and across Africa, tampering with election processes, blocking the internet, packing the courts with party hacks, and stripping away the powers and authority of the supreme court, legislature and administration. This does not necessarily happen immediately, but can be a slower, corrosive process, twisting and twirling the population around fake conspiracies, externalising threats, and justifying measures in the interests of national unity and security.
A referendum to determine whether Greece was to accept the conditions of an international bailout was held in June 2015, and resoundingly rejected by Greek voters, as advocated by the leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, doubling down on these terms. Greece lost economically while he survived politically.
The month following the referendum Tsipras had to reach agreement on new bailout terms with even harsher austerity measures. He delivered exactly the opposite of what the populists promised, proving that what follows populism is usually more extreme populism and then… nothing, as Anne Applebaum observes. This leads invariably “to apathy, exhaustion and a deep conviction that all politics is corrupt”.
Thanasis Bakolas argues:
“The first way to address populism is by not being afraid of them, and speak the truth. You need to offer a positive reason for people to vote for you. It’s simply not enough,” he says, “to call just them out on what they have done. You must also list reasons why people should vote for you”
But it’s difficult to present a centrist Conservative narrative in such a polarised and polarising environment. Anna Diamontopoulou observes that the “centre does not have a convincing narrative even now”.
“To do so, you need to define a clear national goal, a common good, which will ensure that people don’t only stay in the country, but stay engaged in politics,” she says.
Ironically, the biggest accomplishment of the Latin American left in terms of the reduction of inequality is down to a combination of growth and welfare redistribution, both of these factors dependent on conservative macro-economic policies. Liberalism, at least economic liberalism, has no credible rival. Thus, the combination of populism plus socialism seems invariably to end badly.
This is not the only irony. For all of its populist lingo and jingoism, the left in Latin America and Africa has routinely defaulted to age-old authoritarian tactics of demonising its opponents, attacking the media and restricting economic opportunities to a cosseted elite no matter its preference for the so called masses
While democracies are weak and vulnerable to such playbooks, they are not entirely helpless. Technology is invaluable in the fight against the corruption of populism, whatever its dangers of over-intrusion. Media is also a crucial source of oxygen and oversight in protecting values and norms, even though autocrats have learnt quickly to use this tool against democrats, with armies of bots and trolls.
Support for Parliamentary processes is similarly crucial, as South Africa has shown in the fight against State Capture, but that is a responsibility of the public at large, not just political representatives.
In this way, the world is divided not between populists and conservatives, but liberal and illiberal worlds.
President Trump is populism’s Spitting Image, a lightning rod for concerns over its excesses. But confronting authoritarian ambitions demands consistency in squaring up not just to right-wingers, but left-wing regimes too, including in the United Nations and other multilateral fora, whatever the risks of appearing “preachy”.
The need for a less cynical approach is especially true for those, like South Africa, who profess a commitment to liberal human rights as a pillar of their values and dialogue as their preferred political method
Nana Addo ..although he was reading a centre right tradition embraced populism because he wasnt committed to building strong independent institutions to enforce the rule of law, individual rights and ensire that the private sector leads the economy. Instead He believed im his own legend as the hope and the man with all the solutions….This is populism in the end …because with populism its all about the leader….It was all about Nana…and like always populism ends in failure just like JDM did in his first stint as President and tje same will occur this time….
The NPP must return its roots and embrace the centre right and liberal economy ideologies via strong institutions strongly……and do away with the Hero worship and personality cult hero’s and tin gods….in regions and constituencies…
Written by YAw Baah Kissiedu
