Argentina elections: is Alberto Fernández a populist?

Argentina’s presidential election on October 27 has swung power back to the center-left following four years of right-wing rule under Mauricio Macri. The former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is now set to hold the vice-presidency and serve under the experienced—yet until recently little-known—candidate Alberto Fernández.

Following Mr. Fernández’s shock victory in the August national primaries, international commentators quickly went about learning everything they could about Argentina’s next president, and asking a recurring question with many Latin American leaders: is he a populist?

Though not an unreasonable inquiry in a country where populism has a well-established tradition, it tends to be posed in derogatory terms and implies something sinister. So, what exactly is populism? And is it returning to Argentina?

A notoriously slippery term, populism has recently received a flurry of interest in an attempt to make sense of our turbulent political times, applied to everything from Brexit and Donald Trump to the rise of leaders such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

One of the most used definitions in political science comes from Cas Mudde, who argues that populism is an ideology that splits society into two opposed camps of the “pure people” and “the corrupt elite.” A recent report by The Guardian used this approach to look at speeches of world leaders and found that populist rhetoric was steadily on the rise.

As well as an ideology, populism is commonly understood as...