The paper asks what kind of discursive pattern is at the core of undemocratic politicization, what is it that renders a politicization democratic or undemocratic. Instead of looking at right wing populist discourse it concentrates on one thread of critical leftist academic discourse that arose in the 1990s and is characterized by a strong politicization, but also by an emergence of new cleavages, binary confrontations of friend and enemy, that prevent a collective democratic debate.

The presentation analyses “the Gilets Jaunes movement”. It claims that even though the movement was triggered by the introduction of a new bill on fuel tax it has deeper roots in social inequality and a lack of representation of certain disadvantaged groups of French society.

As illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in fragile and seemingly robust democracies—there is growing concern about the longevity of liberalism and democracy. In this talk I examine some ideological and structural roots of the current crisis of liberal democracies, in the West and beyond. I contend that the crisis has evolved from tensions within liberal democracy — and that illiberalism is not just a reaction to the failures of neoliberalization but has generative potential in restructuring the state and undoing the processes necessary to sustain liberal democracy.

The paper discusses the different potential effects of the ongoing (re-)distribution of political opportunities for civil society to interact with EU institutions on the logics of interaction, coalition building and competition among civil society groups in the EU, for instance for the role of the new participatory structures.

Since the end of the 1990s, EU expert groups have either been criticised for lacking legitimacy or hailed as means to democratise the EU. As will be argued, neither is the case. Rather, calls for democratisation have led to de-scientisation and politicisation of expertise, as shown by a study of 21 EU groups of experts on monetary and market integration between 1966 and 2017. Using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) on professional backgrounds, structures of a space of EU expertise are uncovered, changes over time visualised, and politicisation of expertise interpreted as an effect of the emerging field of EU politics.

Drawing on the book “The European Central Bank between the Financial Crisis and Populisms” (Macchiarelli, Monti, Wiesner, and Diessner, 2020 – Palgrave MacMillan), the presentation looks at the evolution of the monetary policy of the ECB during the decade 2010-20, how the central bank managed a delicate balance between ‘interventionism’ and ‘independence’, and the growing challenges to its legitimacy amid the upsurge of populist parties in Europe and Covid-19.