How does populism turn authoritarian? Venezuela serves as prime example
When Hugo Chávez took power in Venezuela nearly 20 years ago, the leftist populism he championed was supposed to save democracy. Instead, it has led to democracy’s implosion in the country.
Venezuela’s fate stands as a warning: Populism is a path that, at its outset, can look and feel democratic. But, followed to its logical conclusion, it can lead to democratic backsliding or even outright authoritarianism.
Populism, however, does not always end in authoritarianism. Venezuela’s collapse has been aided by other factors such as plummeting oil prices, and democratic institutions can check populism’s darker tendencies.
The country shows the fundamental tensions between populism and democracy that are playing out worldwide. Those tensions, if left unchecked, can grow until one of the two systems prevails. But although countries must choose which system to follow, that choice is rarely made consciously, and its consequences may not be clear until it is too late.
The wave of populist anger Chávez rode into office, in 1998 elections, was propelled by grievances with the state of democracy in Venezuela.
When Chávez assumed the presidency, the judiciary was dysfunctional and corrupt. A report by Human Rights Watch found the country’s top administrative court “had actually established set fees for resolving different kinds of cases.”
Less than 1 percent of the population had confidence in the judiciary. As a result, there was broad support for Chávez’s first round of judicial reforms in 1999, which increased judicial independence and integrity, according to a survey that year by the United Nations Development Program.
But when the Supreme Court refused to allow the criminal prosecution of four generals who Chávez believed had participated in an attempted coup against him, he came to see the judiciary as an obstacle to popular will and an accomplice of the corrupt elites he had entered office promising to oppose.
Tensions grew in 2004 when the Supreme Court ruled a petition for a referendum to recall Chávez from office had enough signatures to go forward.
Chávez gave himself the authority to suspend unfriendly judges and to pack the courts with new ones — destroying the judiciary’s power to act as a check on his presidency.
“Over the next several years,” the 2008 Human Rights Watch report found, “the newly packed Supreme Court would fire hundreds of judges and appoint hundreds more.”
In Chávez’s telling, this meant a judiciary that was more responsive to the will and needs of the people — a message that may have appealed to supporters who had voted him into office on promises of smashing the corrupt elite’s hold on power.
Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, wrote in a 2015 column for The Guardian that “populism is an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.”
In other words, Chávez, like other populist leaders, told his supporters their problems were caused by unresponsive, undemocratic elites and institutions. A strong leader, he argued, was necessary to break through those shadowy forces and impose the will of the people.
“However, this comes at a price,” Mudde wrote. This “majoritarian extremism” reframes democracy not as a negotiated process meant to include and serve everyone, but rather as a zerosum battle between popular will and whoever dares to oppose it — including judges, journalists, opposition leaders or even government technocrats.
This is why Kurt Weyland, a University of Texas political scientist, wrote, in a 2013 academic article, “Populism will always stand in tension with democracy.”
Populist leaders like Chávez, by deriving their authority from a promise to champion popular will, “see any institutions outside their control as obstacles to be bypassed or overcome,” Weyuland wrote.
Populism’s authoritarian tendencies could be seen in Chávez’s early battles with labor unions.
Venezuela’s union leaders were corrupt, he argued, and had failed to protect workers’ rights.
His government created a parallel system of new unions, while undermining established unions over which it had less influence. But this set up a dynamic in which pro-Chávez unions were favored and dissenting unions were punished.
These episodes show how initial populist steps — standing up to unelected institutions, paving the way for seemingly necessary reforms — can take on a momentum of their own, until the list of populist enemies has grown to include pillars of basic democracy.
Venezuela exhibits the worst-case outcome of populist governance, in which institutions have been so crippled crime is rampant, corruption is nearly universal and the quality of life has collapsed. But those consequences are obvious only after they have done their damage.