This concluding chapter will try to extract the most significant insights this book has produced and finally outline some perspectives and specify some predictions on that basis. I will comment on a number of the current assumptions and preconceptions dominating the populist debate— in scholarship, the media and the general Zeitgeist— while aiming to steer clear of the wealth of normative judgments, more often than not formulated prior to and not as a consequence of rational analysis, which stand in the way of a cool, neutral and impartial assessment of the populist presence in contemporary politics, culture and society.

First, we have to deal with the so- called definitional question: what is populism really? Do we know more than when we started? Do we have a preciser concept? Jan- Werner Müller is in my view almost correct when he states that populism should be conceived as a moralistic imagination of politics (Müller 2016, 16– 17), but the definition misses two important, additional elements. One, that all national ideas of politics are moralistic, not just the populist version; and second, politics is imagined as having its roots and point of return— its be- all and end- all— in the People and not in their representative elites. In fact, the People is in a significant sense itself a moral concept, since it only arises— as an abstraction, but also as a reality— on the basis of ignoring, abstracting from the concrete, specific and individual characteristics of living persons and their day- to- day interests and concerns, in favor of regarding them as a multitude of equal, like- minded beings, as citizens and part of the Allgemeinheit. Here they express their volonté générale, rarely directly, and more often by means of their political representatives as spokespeople for the State. It is here that populism deviates from the ordinary forms of nationalism that we have become accustomed to, and its “moralistic imagination” too. It is not that normal citizens are not moralistic in their approach to the world of politics, but that they accept a relatively clear- cut line of separation between themselves and their representatives (the “elites”), and largely leave the business of the Commons— legitimated through processes of elections and institutions guaranteeing the rule of law— to the latter. Populists do not.