Populism as a New Revolt of the Masses. What Implications for Democratic Politics?

The debate about the state of democracy has taken a U-turn in the last decade. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, for twenty years there was a widespread optimism about the fact that peoples of the world wanted to elect their leaders and build democratic institutions. This optimist climat was corroborated by significant events: in Eastern Europe and in Latin America many countries started to hold free elections and the citizens expected that this would also have distributed material advantages in terms of economic development, salaries and well-being. But over the last decade the wind has blown n the opposite direction: there are increasing concerns about the fact that a growing number of citizens start to be sympathetic to the perspective of being ruled bye "strongmen" (Foa and Munk, 2016) and the satisfaction with existing institutions in both consolidated and young democracies, has started to decline.