Exploring the foreign policies of populist governments: (Latin) America First

The populist way out: Why contemporary populist leaders seek transnational legitimation

“…Populist leaders accuse technocrats in charge of regional and global governance for their ‘corrupt’ approach to the implementation of democratic procedures, in which they are not accountable to the people’s will (Biegon, 2019: 529–530; Müller, 2017: 19). For example, left-wing populist leaders in Latin America and Europe associate the corrupt transnational establishment with ‘Wall Street’, multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Facebook, and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Wajner, 2021). Paradoxically, they found common ground with both Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, who took similar approaches in fighting against the ‘big corporations, big donors, and big banks’ that allegedly sold out US interests (Boucher and Thies, 2019: 720; Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 5; Skonieczny, 2019: 345–355).…”

Populism and foreign policy: a research agenda (Introduction)

“…Moreover, the analysis suggests that populists in power tend to reinforce several pre-existing trends in international affairs—a fragmentation of international alliances in particular. In a comparative analysis of Latin American populists’ foreign policies, Wajner ( 2021 ) shows they have tended to resort to transnational forms of mutual legitimation and to reproduce domestic approaches to political communication.…”

“…For instance, the collective volume edited by Frank Stengel, David MacDonald and Dirk Nabers is close to the approach adopted here for its comparative and interdisciplinary angle, but the authors stop short of advancing systematic hypotheses or generalizations as they consider that “differences between various forms of populism will likely also manifest themselves in different foreign policy positions” (Stengel et al 2019 , 6). Third, most of the scholarship on the foreign policy of governing populists has focussed on Latin America (Sagarzazu and Thies 2019 ; Wehner and Thies 2020 ; Wajner 2021 ), India (Plagemann and Destradi 2019 ; Wojczewski 2019a ), Turkey (Taş 2020 ) and, especially, the US (Drezner 2019 ; Wojczewski 2019b ; Hall 2021 ). Recent work on Europe has shed light on the foreign preferences of European populist parties (Liang 2007 ; Balfour et al 2016 ; Heinisch et al 2018 ; Coticchia and Vignoli 2020 ; Henke and Maher 2021 ) and how they have been projected at the EU level (Van Berlo and Natorski 2019 ; Futák‐Campbell and Schwieter 2020 ; Falkner and Plattner 2020 ) as well as on populist parties’ sovereignism more generally (see Basile and Mazzoleni 2020 ).…”

Rethinking Populism Geopolitically: Authoritarian Populism and Migration Politics in Britain and Turkey

“…Foreign policy is undoubtedly one of the crucial elements of the geopolitics. There are several studies published recently that incorporates populism within foreign policy analysis (Chryssogelos, 2017;Verbeek &Zaslove, 2017;Destradi and Plagemann, 2019;Plagemann and Destradi, 2018;Taş, 2020;Löfflmann 2019;Wehner and Thies, 2020;Wajner, 2021a). Verbeek and Zaslove point out a puzzling question that although the populist parties share a common distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite, they do not have an identical 'populist 'foreign policy.…”