INTRODUCTION

Despite the recent triumphs of populism in the Western world, its analysis is not very popular among theorists of public law, who usually pass it on to political scientists. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for such an omission.

The first such reason is the fact that the study of populist law as a separate phenomenon is impossible because, like populism itself, populist law is a heterogeneous trend. Populist leaders of the world include figures with such different views and backgrounds as Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and Andrej Babiš – who have their roots in big business; TV personalities such as Beppe Grillo and Volodymyr Zelensky; professional politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson; and former oppositionists in Central European countries, like Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán. Whoever wants to equate their styles of exercising power falls into the trap of reducing populism to its one incarnation: ’ [one] element, often one of a rightist kind … Generalizing views tend not to capture all populisms ‘.

However, populism is not a completely elusive trend for a theoretician, and defining it is not impossible. Although numerous attempts have been made to do so, each of them highlights only one aspect of populism. For example, Chris Berlet and Matthew Lyons argue that populism is generally characterised by ‘attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism’; Jan-Werner Müller raises the problem of the populist claim to politically represent ‘the people as a whole’; Ben Stanley points out that populism is a nihilistic trend, which does not have any ‘core values’; Christopher Lash writes about Manichaean nature; Cas Mudde talks about the populists ‘appeal to the most vulgar emotions of voters; and Margaret Canovan posits that populists postulate the renewal of democracy which is presented by them as corrupt. Definitions can be multiplied. For this chapter, the definitions offered by Berlet and Lyons as well as Stanley will be of key importance, along with another conceptualisation of populism, which highlights the second reason for lawyers’ reluctance to deal with this political trend.