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Silvio Berlusconi:
Italy, terms of office 1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-11
Photo: Angelo Carconi / dpa
A few days after surviving his Covid-19 infection, Donald Trump stepped onto the balcony of the White House and accepted the homage of his supporters.
He shouted that he survived the "terrible China virus".
Now it is a matter of fighting for the "just cause".
"We love you," the crowd roared.
"I love you too," Trump yelled back.
Icon: enlarge
Silvio Berlusconi:
Italy, terms of office 1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-11
Indira Gandhi, d. 1984
: India, terms of office 1966-77, 1980-84
Hugo Chávez, d. 2013:
Venezuela, term of office 1999-2013
Photo: Angelo Carconi / dpa, United Archives / ddp images, Carlos Hernandez / dpa
This is what it sounds like when the most powerful man in the world holds a "Balconazo", a "We against them" speech from the balcony with which Latin American presidents such as Juan Perón in Argentina or Alan García in Peru once won the sympathy of the masses used to secure.
Trump has taken over the practice of copying a lot from the demagogues from the south: the appeal to the common people, the tirades against the establishment, the glorification of the national past.
"Trump is something like the cross sum of modern populism," says Christoph Trebesch, economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
The man must know.
Together with his colleague Manuel Funke and the Bonn economist Moritz Schularick, he researched the political and economic results of more than a hundred years of populism.
The movement that claims to assert the interests of the common man against an exploitative elite.
Sometimes their representatives follow a left agenda like in socialist Venezuela.
Sometimes they appear xenophobic and anti-liberal, like the Hungarian right-wing nationalist Viktor Orbán.
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