Populism has been at the center of recent debates in political science and international relations scholarship. Recognized as a contested concept and framed as a new global phenomenon, populism emerged in the context of liberal democracies, where political actors inflate social antagonisms by putting the people against the elite. Facing a global health crisis where a sense of threat, uncertainty, and emergency has pushed normal politics into the realm of politics of crisis, populists have actively engaged in creating a spectacularization of failure—of science, institutions, experts, governments—vis-à-vis the new Coronavirus, and in creating doubts about and devaluing scientists, experts and governments. Issues such as mask mandates, lockdown measures, compulsory vaccination, medicine effectiveness, and vaccine certificates became politicized. That is, they have been taken from normal politics and made contingent and controversial in order to deepen already existing political divisions and polarization. Exploring the case of Germany and Brazil, we will show how populists tried to use the pandemic to forge divisions between the people and the elite (represented by scientists, health experts, and the press). This conceptual-empirical paper wishes to make a contribution to the debate on how populists brought scientific public health issues into their black-and-white, antagonistic vision of society and hence instrumentalized COVID-19 for their own political gain.
With the Covid-19 pandemic dominating the agenda, it seems almostnatural that it be associated with another buzzword: populism. As thepandemic advances, it seems that the prediction of populism surviving thepandemic due to its own diversity has been proved right, given thevariation in responses by populists around the world. One commondenominator stands out though: populists across the political spectrumunderstood the benefits of performing the Covid-19 crisis as a tool tostrengthen their political positions. They tried to politicize the pandemic toincrease the antagonism between the people and the elites. In this article, Iintroduce the notion of crisis as both a construct and a performance, and asa useful concept to analyze populist reactions to the pandemic. I argue thatnotwithstanding the attempts to politicize the pandemic, the Covid-19 crisisended up imposing its own reality. In other words: the crisis could not beowned by politics.
There is expanding awareness in the IR (International Relations) literature that collective trauma is a common denominator in major events in global politics [...]
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