Log in
Robert A. Heinlein, an American novelist and political thinker, argues that political labels such as democrat, communist, fascist, liberal, or conservative are not fundamental criteria for distinguishing citizens politically; rather, humanity is divided between those who seek to dominate others and those who do not. This reduction of political life to a fundamental asymmetry of domination provides a useful lens for understanding contemporary populism.
In fact, populism does not dismantle democracy abruptly. It erodes it gradually, until the political field itself is hollowed out. It begins by weakening mediating institutions—parties, unions, and associations—and replaces them with a direct relationship between the “leader” and the “people.” In this configuration, disagreement becomes suspicion, and criticism is reframed as hostility to the nation or a threat to its stability. Public debate contracts into slogans and emotional mobilization.
Hannah Arendt warned of the fragility of the public sphere under conditions of “emotional politics”, noting that when mediating institutions erode, political life is reduced to a fragile form of polarization. As pluralism declines, societies drift toward civic and political desertification, creating conditions in which authoritarianism becomes structurally easier to entrench.
Weakening the State, Strengthening Power
Populism carries a central paradox: it strengthens political regimes while weakening the state. Power becomes concentrated in a single figure, institutional mediation is sidelined, and legitimacy shifts from rules and procedures to personality and rhetoric.
As the state becomes identified with an individual will, its institutional logic erodes. Its capacity to act impartially, manage conflict, and endure beyond political cycles fades away. Gradually, institutions lose autonomy, and governance becomes dependent on loyalty networks and emotional mobilization rather than institutional coherence.
The Hollowing Out of Politics
Prominent scholars, including Nadia Urbinati, argue that when populism becomes a governing logic, it empties politics of its pluralistic substance. It weakens representation and reconstructs the public sphere as a moral confrontation between the “true people” and their “enemies”.
In this framework, disagreement becomes illegitimate, and opposition is redefined as delegitimisation rather than democratic competition.
Personalisation of power reinforces this shift. While it may appear to increase decisiveness and responsiveness, it mainly produces volatility and improvisation, weakening institutional rationality.
This is particularly visible in the economic sphere, where stability, predictability, and policy coherence are essential. When economic decisions are driven by political moods or short-term calculations, uncertainty rises, trust declines, and the state’s capacity to plan and manage crises deteriorates.
Populism and Exclusionary Ideologies
The danger of populism intensifies when it converges with exclusionary ideologies that merge the language of “the people” with claims of absolute identity or singular truth. At this point, populism ceases to be a political style and becomes a mechanism of legitimised exclusion.
Politics is no longer a space of deliberation, but a field of moral and identity-based division between “us” and “them.” The nation is reduced to a single homogeneous body, citizens become followers, and opponents are considered as threats or traitors. In other words, politics as a shared civic space is gradually replaced by a logic of symbolic “exclusion and purification”.
The Tunisian Case
In Tunisia, decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali did not only restrict political competition. They also weakened politics as a space of dialogue, negotiation, and institutional practice.
Political parties, trade unions, and intermediary structures were marginalised, leaving behind a fragile institutional culture at the moment of transition. The democratic opening thus took place in a vacuum quickly filled by competing and often incompatible discourses.
Hardline ideological currents—religious, identity-based, and populist (both right and left)—emerged as radical alternatives to a delegitimised regime. Yet instead of consolidating pluralism, they displaced politics from its deliberative foundations, reinforcing polarisation and privileging certainty over compromise, much needed in such circumstances.
This vacuum also reflects a deeper transformation: society itself gradually withdrew from politics. As trust declined and representation weakened, citizens disengaged not only from participation but from belief in politics as a meaningful space of change. Public life shifted from engagement to observation, from agency to detachment.
The crisis thus became structural: not only a failure of representation, but a rupture in the relationship between society and politics. Politics lost both effectiveness and mobilising capacity. It was left without actors—and without belief.
A Dual Impasse
Tunisia now faces a dual impasse: a governing authority unable to produce a unifying political vision, and an opposition unable to transform protest into credible alternatives.
Between an unconvincing official discourse and fragmented dissent, the political space continues to shrink. Politics no longer functions as a mechanism for managing difference, it rather becomes a tense interaction between exhausted legitimacy and disorganised opposition.
When rulers cannot produce meaning and opposition cannot produce alternatives, politics is reduced to surface noise masking a deeper void: declining legitimacy, ineffective dissent, and public disillusionment with all actors.
This reflects a broader systemic failure: a weakened state unable to respond to structural socioeconomic pressures, a fragmented opposition lacking force and credibility, and a constrained civil society unable to influence power or agenda-setting.
The public sphere shrinks accordingly. Politics becomes crisis management rather than collective projection. Institutions persist without effectiveness, discourse without persuasion, and actors without influence. In such conditions, democracy is not destroyed abruptly; it is slowly exhausted, losing meaning before losing form.
Reclaiming the Public Sphere
Reversing this trajectory requires more than protest or rhetoric. It requires a long, sustained process of institutional reconstruction.
The first step is restoring the state as a system of rules: an independent judiciary, a neutral administration, and a genuine separation of powers capable of limiting the concentration of authority.
Equally important is rebuilding mediating structures: programmatic political parties rather than personality-based formations, a civil society capable of shaping policy rather than merely reacting, and a public sphere where disagreement is not criminalised or delegitimised.
Democracy is sustained not by sentiment, but by institutions, organization, and durable practices of collective engagement.
The Economy as a Structural Constraint
Economic fragility intensifies political instability. Declining purchasing power and persistent uncertainty signal a system under strain. No recovery is possible without stability, coherence, and predictability in public policy.
Fiscal reform, administrative modernization, and investment incentives remain necessary, but their impact is limited without a stable political framework that restores confidence and reduces uncertainty.
Without this, the damage extends beyond investment and stability to the erosion of living standards, the weakening of the middle class, and growing social fragility. Stability is therefore not only a political requirement but an economic condition of survival.
Rebuilding the state is neither an event nor a slogan, but a long historical process: institutional reconstruction, political reactivation, and the gradual restoration of trust between state and society.
Without such a trajectory, governance risks becoming a cycle of managed crises—regardless of who holds power—where instability is reproduced rather than resolved, and where the state survives only through the continuous reproduction of its own fragility.
Ultimately, the danger of populism lies not only in its rhetoric, but in its slow institutional effects. Democracies rarely collapse in a single moment; they erode from within, through the gradual weakening of the structures that make pluralism, mediation, and public life possible.
Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.
