Populism and Neoliberalism. Notes on the Morphology of a ‘Perverse Alliance’

This article reflects on the commonalities of contemporary right-wing populism and neoliberalism. It thereby focuses on how neoliberalism has undone the ontological basis of the modern sovereign people and how this process has generated the conditions for the possibility of neo-populism, which thus appears as the obscene reverse of neoliberalism. Populism and neoliberalism form a ‘perverse alliance’ that leads them to fight the same battle, albeit in different forms, against material equality. Populism fights this battle with two privileged instruments: a ‘war of values’ that deflects interest from the conflict against socio-economic inequality and a ‘war on migrants’ that amplifies xeno-populism while nevertheless sharing with neoliberalism the processes of the hierarchisation of citizenship and social order.