Populism in Times of Spectacularization of the Pandemic: How Populists in Germany and Brazil Tried to ‘Own the Virus’ but Failed

Erica Resende () and Sybille Reinke de Buitrago
Additional contact information
Erica Resende: Department of Politics, Brazilian War College, Rio de Janeiro 22290-270, RJ, Brazil
Sybille Reinke de Buitrago: Geschäftsführung IKriS, Institut für Kriminalitäts- und Sicherheitsforschung (IKriS), 31582 Nienburg, Germany

Societies, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Populism has been at the center of recent debates in political science and international relations scholarship. Recognized as a contested concept and framed as a new global phenomenon, populism emerged in the context of liberal democracies, where political actors inflate social antagonisms by putting the people against the elite. Facing a global health crisis where a sense of threat, uncertainty, and emergency has pushed normal politics into the realm of politics of crisis, populists have actively engaged in creating a spectacularization of failure—of science, institutions, experts, governments—vis-à-vis the new Coronavirus, and in creating doubts about and devaluing scientists, experts and governments. Issues such as mask mandates, lockdown measures, compulsory vaccination, medicine effectiveness, and vaccine certificates became politicized. That is, they have been taken from normal politics and made contingent and controversial in order to deepen already existing political divisions and polarization. Exploring the case of Germany and Brazil, we will show how populists tried to use the pandemic to forge divisions between the people and the elite (represented by scientists, health experts, and the press). This conceptual-empirical paper wishes to make a contribution to the debate on how populists brought scientific public health issues into their black-and-white, antagonistic vision of society and hence instrumentalized COVID-19 for their own political gain.

Keywords: populism; COVID-19; global health; trauma; politization; social antagonism; Germany; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/13/1/9/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/13/1/9/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:13:y:2022:i:1:p:9-:d:1019198

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().