New cleavage in old Europe: toward a political sociology of populism

The European political systems are at the centre of a long process of transformation of the players in traditional cleavage politics, from the viewpoint of identities, functions performed, and type of organization. The diminishing capacity of the mainstream parties to represent the demands that come from new social groups has progressively favoured the growth of a sentiment of opposition toward the political class and toward traditional parties, which can assume the forms of apathy, with voter abstention, and protest, with the foundations of anti-establishment parties. How much, then, does populism represent a political option for reorganising a political fracture or, on the other hand, does it qualify as politicisation, a transitional phase between the deconstruction and the soon-to-be reconstruction of a socio-political conflict? For a sociological analysis of populism it becomes important to critically analyse if and how much such a phenomenon is destined to appear and disappear as a contingent political form that is triggered in times of crisis, but not as a solution to the crisis, or if instead it is a matter of a social fracture, with its own ideological nucleus and a politicisation at the foundation of a stable, systematic transformation.