ABSTRACT
Starting in the years around the millennium, the word ‘populism’ began to appear in Asia (Mizuno and Pasuk 2009).1 In the Philippines, Joseph Estrada was dubbed a populist after he won election as president in 1998 as a hero of the poor. In Thailand, a Thai translation of the word ‘populist’ was created to describe Thaksin Shinawatra’s 2001 electoral success on a platform of rural reforms and his subsequent commitment to work ‘for the people’ (Pasuk and Baker 2009: 8). In South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun’s rise to the presidency in 2002 against the opposition of the established political elite was explained in terms of his nationalist and populist appeal. Similarly in Taiwan, the success of Chen Shui-bian, son of a poor tenant farmer, in capturing the presidency against the party which had ruled Taiwan since its foundation, was attributed in part to his populist appeal. In Japan in 2001, the surprising rise of the maverick politician, Jun’ichiro Koizumi, to head the ruling party and the government, excited comment about his populist allure (Calder 2001). A few years later, S.B. Yudhyono’s campaign for re-election as president in 2009 was described as a populist innovation in Indonesian politics (Wahyu 2010). ‘Populism’ is a notoriously slippery word. Often it is used as a term of abuse. Some analysts
argue its meaning is too imprecise for the term to be useful, and others that its use should be confined to certain places and eras where its meaning is clearer, especially late nineteenth-century USA and Latin America since the 1930s. Yet an alternative view is that the appearance of the word in a particular context signifies something and is worthy of analysis. Several scholars have argued that it is pointless to tie the term to a particular ideology, or a particular form of political organization, or a particular social equation. Where the term ‘populism’ was once criticized constantly for being ‘vague’, the broadness of the term is now seen as an asset. Especially in the work of Ernesto Laclau and his associates, populism has been identified as a form of political practice that could appear in varied contexts (Laclau 2005; Panizza 2005). Kenneth Roberts (2006) summarized ‘the essential core of populism’ as ‘the political mobi-
lization of mass constituencies by personalistic leaders who challenge established elites’. Sabatini and Farnsworth (2006: 63, n. 2) point out that ‘populism’ is used to describe any movement that ‘mobilises those who feel themselves to be disadvantaged by socioeconomic and political dislocation, as well as a leadership style that draws on a sense of disaffection from the established
political system and elites’. Margaret Canovan (1999: 3) stressed that populist movements ‘involve some kinds of revolt against the established structure of power in the name of the people. Populists claim legitimacy on the ground that they speak for the people.’ The appearance of populism in Asia was bound up with the Asian economic crisis of 1997
or, more broadly, with the trends within globalization that conspired to create the crisis, and with the social impact left in its wake. The crisis came after an unprecedented boom in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. Over a generation, Japan was established as the world’s prime manufacturing economy. Korea and Taiwan grew at rates that even surpassed Japan in its heyday. Southeast Asian countries seemed to be readying themselves for a similar surge. New wealth, new aspirations and new pride were created across the region. Against this background, the financial disarray of 1997 was a crisis not only for economies but for ruling oligarchies, and for the state itself.2 Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia faced not only dramatic reversals in economic growth, but intrusions by the IMF on their economic sovereignty, and wholesale denigration of their economic strategies and political systems at the hands of western analysts. As existing political elites were discredited, people looked for someone to rescue them from
hardship and restore their pride and aspirations. The stage was thus set for the rise of political leaders who had strong personal appeal and an ability to present themselves as somehow different from an old elite. The 1997 crisis also created pools of discontent, especially among urban labour, peasant farmers and migrant workers who often bore the brunt of the downturn in the form of unemployment and falling real incomes. There was discontent also among urban middle classes that had become accustomed to rising prosperity, and had often allowed their aspirations to race ahead of reality. Populist leaders rose on the support of coalitions of discontent. In the five years following the financial crisis, virtually every Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian country with an open economy experienced a jolting political disjuncture of some kind. The political career of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand belongs to this wave of Asian popu-
lism. He rose to power in the immediate aftermath of the crisis by focusing discontent against the old political leadership. He became the bearer of the hopes of many and varied groups. Like most of the other Asian populists of this wave, he was brought down when he failed to deliver against many of those hopes, and when the old establishment rallied in self-defence. But perhaps more than the others, Thaksin exposed the rifts that had been opened in society by prior decades of uneven development and limited distribution of power. His career sparked a mobilization of mass forces on a scale not previously seen in Thai politics. Although he and most of the other Asian populists were driven from power and replaced by the conservative forces they had challenged, Thai politics has been fundamentally changed.
