We live in the era of fashion: we strive to wear fashionble clothes, to travel to fancy places, to eat at trendy restaurants, to watch audience-breaking television, to read best-selling books, and so much more. Every subject has its trends, and we like to be a part of them. Being out of the fashion limits makes us feel unconfortable: we feel observed, and discredited; taken as buffons, idiots, or striving for attention. We’ve even made a trend of people claiming to be “not into fashion”, the so called Hipsters, who have kicked off a trend of people who all dress, behave, and do similar things but claim to be trying to be “beyond fashion” and “not caring about it”. Sometimes we can become rather ironical with ourselves.

There’s even trendy words to use in each segment of society, especially amongst politicians. Our political representatives have realised how much of an advertising competition their job is, rather than a matter of governing and ruling a country, that’s up to government officials, and have adopted every possible marketing technique to their practices, speech, and looks, in order to sell better to the public and gather more vote. They will exploit and overuse, often out of context and for no reason, words such as democracy, freedom, change, progress, and others to refer to themselves, whislt using words such as nazism, fascism, populism, demagogy, continuism, and so on to refer to their rivals (their political rivals, as their real enemy is public opinion). It becomes a mixture of comical and pathetic to see how political forces who are supposed to be opposite really only argue about rather superficial stuff, having very few disagreements and differences over deep core policy, behaving almost identically, together with their advertising themselves as the “change” or “reform”.

The art of spelling plenty of words carrying barely no meaning has been caricaturized by comedians, artists, and media, and mastered by our political representatives in the institutions. Their job is no longer to exercise government, that is up to officials who don’t appear on television, but instead their duty is to win elections, and do everything on their power (which is larger than you think) to do so. For that purpose, not only they will show a splendorous marketing deployment, but they will also try their best to carry out reforms, precisely designed to have very little effect in the economical system, and a large attention in the eyes of the media. It’s just like when we were little kids, and we would cover the bed with the blanket and hide the toys under the furniture in order to claim that our room was ordered to our parents.

In a democracy like the one we claim to live in, politicians attempting to win elections is not a negative situation, but a rather important one: it’s the only reason why they will carry out the actions we want the to so we grant them our support. There is an implicit contract in voting, by which the people will hold their support for a candidate as soon as he carries out what they asked him to, regardless of what else he does, or if they are right or not in their choice. That is what we call the democratic mandate: being voted to do something in particular once in power if achieved, and it’s the fundamental expression of general will in a representative democacy, perhaps the only way for people to have a voice in the rooms of government after all.

Most representative democracies in the world consist of two main parties, directly opposed in theory, who are the only ones in position of winning elections and carrying out government. These two parties tend to have been in such position for a long time, or have inherited their position from one who had been there previously. They have rather stable support groups from specific segments of the population, and only fight to swing a small part of the vote to one side or the other. They aren’t even that different in their ideas either, and will carry out similar policies once in government, if not identical ones, despite that the “opposition” party will always criticise all what the one in power does.

This balanced form of “democracy” has remained stable for the las few decades in most of the world, but in the recent years, a whole set of new political forces have developed and risen out of the ground, taking a direct punch to the established sides. They have arrived as a popular response to a variety of events causing unrest in the population, mainly corruption, the economical crisis, and globalization, and take very different approaches to the problem: some are left wing waves, promising real moves to tax the wealthy corrupt; others are nationalist movements, furious in seeing how the power and profits of their nation are driven away of their borders due to the increasing globalised economy. In some places, they defend a political reboot, with deep reforms in their legislation and political structure. In others, they defend a national strengthment. Sometimes, they even take the form of independence movements. Each is different, yet they all have similar causes of anger.

The preestablished forces we discussed are nervous, as more and more people move their support away from them toward the new “radicals”, and more and more of their shames become uncovered. Witnessing this disaster, they have quickly called those movements populists and demagogues, as they go on huge political rallies and rely on great promises and speeches. The plague is now so vast, that those “populists” have appeared in almost every country, pointing towards dramatic shifts in political positions in the near future, which drives us to ask ourselves: is this really demagogy? Or is it rather open and clear democratic mandate?

Some examples for these kind of movements are the victory of Brexit, Donald Trump, Greek Syriza, and independence movements such as Catalonia or Scotland. All of them are referred to as populists by the main traditional forces, all are responses to economical crisis and globalisation, and all have achived power in larger or lesser extent, though none of them has yet reached the goals they were looking for: Britain is yet to leave the EU, Trump hasn’t had time yet to do anything as he’s just won the election, Greece is still trapped in the same economical breakdown as years before, and Catalonia’s independence process is entering its final stages. Neverheless, they all rather different from each other. Trump and Brexit claim for the reconstruction of their respective nations from the damage that globalisation may be causing, whilst the Catalan and Scottish independence movements are more left wing movements, clashing against the right wing powers of their respective containing rivals.

It is undeniable that those movements have in their side popular opinion: they’ve all won elections, or are supported by half their population, who is convinced and resoluted about those ideas. Most Brexit and Trump supporters have seen their jobs and industry move away from their homes into low wage states, and want their government to do something about it. Those new “populist” movements have been appointed with a democratic mandate by the people, a purpose, regardless if it is or not the right choice. In fact, demagogy is perhaps more what those previous two sides represent more than anything: speeches and promises lacking all meaning, advertising “change” and “reform” that never came to exist, relying solely on words and marketing, and being time after time related to corruption and obscured practices.

Perhaps that so called demagogy that has arrived to overthrow the establishment is a lot more democratic than everything preceeding it. Not only that, but maybe that is democracy really coming into play after having fallen asleep. In the end, it’s been sovereign people who have made those events possible, and it’s been that sovereign people who has voted from, freely, deliberately. If mistaken, they will have to learn from their errors and choose better next time. Isn’t that what democracy should look like?