Post-populismo: dalla sconfitta del ‘popolo’ all’authoritarian turn

This article examines the trajectory of populism from its early twenty-first-century revival – when ‘the people’ returned as a central political category – to its transformation into new forms of nationalist and authoritarian politics. It argues that contemporary right-wing populisms, once presented as anti-elitist and popular movements, have evolved into vehicles of neoliberal governance that reinforce rather than challenge existing inequalities. Through an analysis of the conceptual ambiguity of ‘the people’ in populist discourse, the paper traces how the populist promise of restoring popular sovereignty has given way to its hollowing out. The ‘people-as-part’, once imagined as the excluded and oppositional subject, has been neutralized by its fusion with the ‘people-as-nation’, a nativist and exclusionary construct that redirects social conflict outward. Examining cases from Italy, the United States, Argentina, and Hungary, the article identifies an elective affinity between right-wing populism and neoliberal rationality, which transforms the democratic demos into a collection of individualized, competitive subjects. What emerges is a form of post-populism – nationalist, hierarchical, and authoritarian – in which demands for equality are displaced by identity-based claims, and the ‘nation’ devours ‘the people’. The resulting authoritarian turn signals not the triumph of popular sovereignty but its defeat, marking the transition from protest to the consolidation of an anti-egalitarian, neoliberal order cloaked in populist rhetoric.