Unpacking the Power of Memory in Populism

As I am writing this essay, political observers and colleagues at the IWM and elsewhere celebrate the victory of the opposition in Poland’s recent parliamentary elections. The joy and relief for the country are even more heartfelt after the grim results of Slovakia’s elections that took place only a couple of weeks earlier. And especially as the state of liberal democracy in Hungary remains grim, to say the least, and in the Czech Republic the populist ANO party’s renewed popularity suggests it could return to power in 2025. However, despite this brief occasion for celebration, the return to pre-populist liberal democracy is unlikely in all four countries.

The decline in the quality of democracy and the rise of populism in Central Eastern Europe over the past decade have been noteworthy. Nationalism, racism, and the “symbolic thickening of public culture,” as Jan Kubik calls it, aiming to promote and preserve “traditional” social institutions and cultural heritage, have also seen a resurgence. Rather than creating a vision for the future, populist leaders have adeptly reshaped historical narratives to serve their contemporary political agendas. This “crisis of the future,” in which the future no longer serves as a unifying force, has made the past an essential soft-power resource. In this context, selective historical memory is often explicitly crafted by populist movements to mobilize voters and gain their support. Its relevance and potency lie in the fact that the “present past” rather than the “present future” functions as the apparent quintessential foundation of a political community, clearly distinguishing between “us” and “them.” Indeed, this fundamental juxtaposition between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” is the most common, yet vague, definitional cornerstone of populism.

Memory and Populism

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has harnessed the contentious memory of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, stoking nationalistic sentiment and a sense of historical injustice to justify his consolidation of power and the assertion of Hungarian sovereignty. In Poland, Jaroslav Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice party, has implemented stringent memory laws that suppress references to Polish involvement in the Holocaust, quashing dissent and reinforcing national pride to solidify his political influence. In Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico has faced criticism for his revisionist approach to Jozef Tiso, the leader of the Slovak Republic state during the Second World War. By downplaying Tiso’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, Fico has sought to appease far-right elements within his coalition and maintain his political control. In the same vein, in the Czech Republic, former prime minister Andrej Babiš has utilized historical narratives surrounding the Munich Agreement to bolster his political standing. He has frequently referenced the agreement, which led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, to rally nationalist sentiment among his supporters and to justify his ambivalent positions on European integration.

Antagonistic Memories

These leaders illustrate the use and abuse of historical memory to advance political agendas, often at the expense of unifying politics and historical accuracy. In particular, they capitalize on contentious and conflicting collective memories of events, known as “antagonistic memories.” These usually revolve around events that have deep emotional significance and the power to trigger impassioned outbursts in a population, such as the “humiliation” of Trianon, Holocaust “guilt,” Nazi “shame,” or the “betrayal” of Munich. Antagonistic collective memories are fuelled by an unprocessed, difficult past that can be used to ignite people’s old fears and resentments to promote polarizing political agendas.

To understand this intrinsic relationship between antagonistic memories and populist agendas, the historical background is vital. The region’s transformation from pronounced heterogeneity to relative ethnic homogeneity during the course of the twentieth century can be linked to both World Wars and the population transfers, forced displacements, and genocides that followed. The extremely difficult process of working through the past, exemplified by West Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung regarding the Holocaust, barely took root in Central Eastern European countries. Troubling memories of forced displacements and ethnic cleansings were heavily suppressed during the socialist era, and remembering the vanished others remains contentious to this day, as the examples presented above shows.

The complexity of such historical experience for a region existing simultaneously at the edges but also at the center of the main socio-political forces is reflected in a multitude of challenging and often contradictory historical narratives. These are variably addressed in academic writing as “disputed memories,” “difficult heritage,” “contested memories,” “twilight memories,” and even “memory wars.” What these contestations show is that maintaining the ideology of a primordial ethno-national homogeneity while simultaneously silencing any memories of expulsions, forced assimilations, or ethnic cleansings is a precarious and laborious affair, involving denial and “prescriptive forgetting” of the vanished others and of lost heterogeneity, as well as other forms of memory work.

Anthropology of Populist Voters

However, it is the conceptualization, understanding, and discussion of how memory and populism interact in the everyday lives and realities of ordinary citizens that is missing. While the literature dealing with the illiberal turn and democratic backsliding—coming primarily from political science—is extremely useful in terms of its contextualization and theoretical grounding, there has been comparatively less work on understanding and explaining people’s emic, bottom-up perspective. It is as if ordinary people, as opposed to political or public figures, have nothing to say about their own understandings of the past, present, and future, or about their reasons for sympathizing with populist movements and political parties.

To understand the relationship between mnemonic politics and the current illiberal turn, one needs to take the understandings and motivations of ordinary voters seriously, instead of brushing them off and trivializing them. Overlooking the intricate motivations and narrative accounts behind individuals’ support for populist leaders and parties only further hinders our comprehensive grasp of populism and its accompanying societal shifts. If we truly aspire to study and understand the illiberal turn, it is imperative that we refrain from passing condescending judgment on those who align with illiberal agendas and instead endeavour to fathom the worldviews and everyday mnemonic practices of ordinary citizens, irrespective of our personal political stances and convictions. This approach promotes empathy and a willingness to engage with diverse perspectives, contributing to a more inclusive and rounded study of populism and its societal implications.

This essay straddles between and draws on my pilot study of the subject, published as Exploring Populism Through the Politics of Commemoration (Europe-Asia Studies, 2021) and the upcoming ERC StG research project MEMPOP: Memory and Populism from Below (2024-2028).

Johana Wyss is a social anthropologist and researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She was IWM Jan Patočka Junior Visiting Fellow between June and December 2023.