Anders Hellström Help! The Populists Are Coming Appeals to the People in Contemporary Swedish Politics MIM WORKING PAPER SERIES 13:4 MIM Working Papers Series No 13:4 Published 2013 Editors Christian Fernández,
[email protected] Published by Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) Malmö University 205 06 Malmö Sweden Online publication www.bit.mah.se/muep ANDERS HELLSTRÖM Help! The Populists Are Coming Appeals to the People in Contemporary Swedish Politics Abstract This article introduces the concept of banal populism to emphasize the intrinsic ambiguity of the relationship between democracy and populism in representative politics. The article expands on three approaches to populism, based on ideology, style and logic to suggest a framework for the study of articulations of banal populism in the everyday political communication between the people and the mediated elite, devoid of normative presup- positions. Empirically, the article shows how the rhetorical figure of the reality people [Verklighetens folk] has been used differently by three political parties in Sweden; i. e the right-wing populist party New Democracy (NyD), in parliament between 1991 and 1994, the Christian Democratic Party (KD) which is currently in the government and also by the nationalist-populist party the Sweden Democrats (SD), which gained 20 seats in the par- liament by 2010. The article concludes that the struggle of who the people are and what they wish for is a permanent companion nested in the everyday communication of the votes. Keywords: Populism. banal populism, the reality people, the Sweden Democrats, the New Democra- cy, the Christian Democrats Bio note: Anders Hellström is Associate Professor in Political Science.