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Asian Angle | What do Modi, Trump, Ardern and Trudeau have in common? The power of populism
- Never mind the rise of right-wing heads of state. The new breed of leader is progressive, but just as charismatic – meet the alt-populists
- Voters across Asia are likely to place their fates in the hands of these young leaders, who promise energetic and innovative governance, writes Richard Heydarian
Reading Time:4 minutes
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For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, according to Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. Something very similar is happening to the physics of power in contemporary societies.
What we are witnessing is the emergence of two radically different and equally attractive models of what the great German sociologist Max Weber described as “charismatic” leadership.
This month saw the landslide victory of a 41-year-old former comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Ukrainian presidential elections. He handily defeated the incumbent, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, in a historic election with broader regional implications. As the youthful president-elect exclaimed after his victory: “I can tell all post-Soviet countries, ‘Look at us! Everything is possible!’”
What brings this new breed of leaders to power is not so much their experience in office, but precisely their transcendence of establishment politics as “outsiders”.
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In many ways, what’s taking place is a clash between varieties of populism, rather than between populists and traditional politicians alone.
Over the past decade, the world has been transfixed by the rise of right-wing populists, ranging from Donald Trump in the West and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, to Rodrigo Duterte in the tropics and Narendra Modi in the world’s largest democracy, India.
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