Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzanne Monsenk and Jack Smith.

This morning we would like to talk about populism. Silvio Bellisconi died this week.

Boris Johnson resigned this week and Trump landed in a federal criminal court.

It superficially looks like it has been a very, very bad week for populism. Is that really

the case, Jack? One way of describing it might be a bad week for populists and maybe not such a

bad week for populism, but that would be one way of putting it. But yeah, firstly, kind of on to

Berlusconi. And I think Berlusconi's

personal story versus the significance he's had in Italian politics does kind of show why a bad

period for individual populists might not mean the end of populism. So I guess if you kind of think

about it, in some ways Berlusconi, up until he passed away, looked almost a little bit like a fossil.

Berlusconi was still around, but his premiership ended in flames more than a decade ago.

The influence he exerted on Italian politics was still there, but it was very much diminished.

He was outmaneuvered by a series

of right-wing successors. So, however, you can see both kind of the template for populism

around the world and also the template for increasingly the sort of politician you have to be

to be successful in Italy in Berlusconi. I mean, one of the first big things that he did was he set up a very

personalist dynamic, which is, again, what you see in populism elsewhere. So you see it with Trump,

you see it maybe to a slightly lesser extent with Boris Johnson. And then you see it with the

politicians that have succeeded him in Italy, like Matteo Salvini and Georgia Maloney, where there is like a party, but the party increasingly doesn't matter.

There are policies, but the policies increasingly don't matter.

What does matter is the figure of the leader and the extent to which the leader personally

embodies, I don't know, qualities or characteristics of the electorate that they are trying to speak to.

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