Populisms old and new: the Peruvian case⋆

Abstract

President Fujimori is often seen as exemplary of the Latin American “neopopulist”. Having inherited a country in crisis, he managed to engineer profound changes in the economic sphere, legitimising his government through a direct rapport with the mass of the population that marginalised representative institutions. This article seeks to place this “neopopulism” in an historical context by focusing on the socio-economic and political characteristics that have sustained a tradition of populism in Peru. It argues that “top-down” styles of political mobilisation have long had a debilitating effect on the development of a representative party system, and that populist traits can be traced through regimes of widely differing ideological orientations.