Across the world, authoritarian, populist politics has made remarkable gains in recent years. Populist leaders have exploited poverty, inequalities, resentment and uncertainty to attract support and take power.
The problems they exploit are most deeply felt in rural areas, and authoritarian leaders appeal directly to the concerns of people in the countryside as a vital source of support. But the rural dimension is frequently ignored in debates about what drives people to support these politics. If it’s not ignored, it is often over-simplified or fails by stereotyping rural people’s concerns.
In order to challenge the rise of authoritarian populism, we need to understand how it appeals to people in rural areas, and what alternative forms of politics exist. These questions are explored in a new book, Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World, co-edited by Ian Scoones, which will be discussed in an online launch event on 16 February. The book draws on the work of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) since 2016.
What is authoritarian populism?
Although politics and cultures vary hugely across countries and regions, the label of ‘authoritarian populism’ brings together some common themes.
These include a claim to represent or advocate on behalf of ‘the people’, typically defined in exclusionary terms; a multi-class political base; disdain for traditional political and economic elites and their cultural cosmopolitanism; hatred and repressive policies directed at stigmatized Others at home; and suspicion of ‘threatening’ adversaries abroad, whether unscrupulous trading partners, potential terrorists, criminal networks or immigrant caravans.
Populist right-wing parties, despite the dissonance in values and messages, have appealed to many with promises of jobs, investment and renewal, combined with a nationalist anti-immigrant rhetoric that resonates with those who feel under threat – with often catastrophic results.
How have populists appealed to those in rural areas?
It might seem odd that people vote in ways that are not ‘rational’, or support politicians or movements that don’t serve their interests, and who may even have made policies that harm them. But this overlooks the role of identity, belonging and community in shaping people’s political decisions, and how effectively populists – both on the left and right – appeal to these values and the histories that inform them.
Populists have capitalised on a number of problems affecting rural areas – made worse by neoliberal policies that deepened economic inequality and concentrated wealth and income, brought stagnating or declining wages, eroded labour rights, undermined small businesses and farms, gutted the public sector, and severely cut social provisioning of all kinds.
Rural zones have felt these problems especially deeply, sometimes leading to resentment of more affluent areas or outsiders, at home or abroad. People’s disillusionment with the status quo, across often disconnected rural areas and small towns, is tangible across settings.
Lack of jobs and livelihoods is blamed on outsiders — often immigrant populations working in agricultural industries in marginalised areas. Declining rural and small-town livelihoods are often, in turn, linked to drug abuse and physical and mental ill-health and increasing despair. In the USA, Trump is no longer president, but white supremacist groups such as the Patriot movement draw on rural imagery and concerns about land ownership and rural industries. In Brazil, Bolsonaro won with strong support from agribusiness sectors eager to jettison environmental regulations and burn the Amazon. In France and Sweden, nationalist parties have focused increasingly on agrarian issues and the interests of farmers and forest owners.
The disenchantment and disenfranchisement felt in such areas is the result of state neglect over decades, thanks to neoliberal policies that brought austerity, extraction and exploitation. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these fractures, exposing inequalities and the failures of mainstream neoliberal capitalism, and reinforcing patterns of authoritarianism in some settings.
The way this plays out depends on local histories and settings. Populists may mobilise either around ethno-nationalist arguments – for example when global migration flows create discontents – or around class divisions – such as when global trade has impacts on livelihoods.
Despite the claims of authoritarian politics to defend rural people, they often result in the opposite. In some settings, they can support the ongoing extraction and exploitation of rural resources, as land, water and resource grabbing continue. At the same time, green and conservation policies are generating authoritarian, neoliberal dynamics in the countryside in many places. New alliances are being forged between capital, elites and the state.
Resistance and hope
Yet amongst much despair, disenfranchisement and deepening inequalities, there are signs of hope. Emancipatory alternatives are being created in rural areas and small towns. They offer the opportunity to prefigure a new politics. In very diverse settings, in diverse ways, these are rooted in communities, linked to rural skills, trades and cultures and encourage collectivity and solidarity, often around forms of ‘commoning’. Very often they make use of modern technology to encourage connectivity, sharing and building solidarities.
Movements, such as those around food sovereignty, help mobilise around and extend such alternatives. Such initiatives can help to build a new economy, which is sustainable and addresses the threats of climate chaos.
These efforts also serve as platforms for broader political conversations that concern matters far beyond self-help projects and their local communities. They shed light on issues of system-wide transformations, class politics and political power.
Even here, though, there are problems. The notions of sovereignty, localism, autonomy and rejection of the role of the state and globalism have frequently been captured by regressive, populist positions. Why do peasant farmers support such political leaders? Partly because they claim to offer a voice and a commitment to protecting their autonomy from the ill-winds of global trade and state interference.
For example, in India ideas about ‘natural farming’ based on agro-ecological principles have got wrapped up in exclusionary Hindutva nationalism, yet are celebrated as a food sovereignty success. A new politics of ‘the alternative’ needs to be highly aware of the ways such arguments are exploited and turned back towards exclusionary politics. Local, rooted alternatives need to be connected to wider debates about what transformation looks like, and how positive alternatives can be linked and grow together.
More information
This blog post is based on the Preface (written by Ian Scoones, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Wendy Wolford and Ben White) to the book Authoritarian Politics and the Rural World (Routledge, 2022).
You can join the launch event on 16 February by registering on the Transnational Institute website. Speakers include Achin Vanaik (TNI, India), Garrett Lovelace-Graddy (American University, USA), Ayala Ferreira (MST, Amazonas) and Attila Szocs (Ecoruralis & ECVC, Romania).