ITS populist promises betrayed for the umpteenth time, the PTI made less than a triumphant return to parliament this week. It was only a few weeks ago that one of Imran Khan’s blue-eyed boys announced that the politics of left and right had been replaced by the politics of right and wrong. But surely what was wrong yesterday (read: sitting in parliament) does not suddenly become right today?

In truth, populists change tack pretty regularly because the rhetorical categories they employ are deliberately vague so as to permit shifts in strategy and tactics, sometimes of a quite dramatic nature. Frustrating as it may be for those who decry their apparent opportunism, it is precisely the malleability of populists’ discourse that makes them a permanent fixture in the mass media-dominated political field of the early 21st century.

Populism, according to the post-Marxist Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau, is a politics that is based on a fundamental dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In most cases, populists claim to represent ‘the people’ and oppose an oppressor such as ‘the elite’ — both antagonists are what Laclau calls ‘empty signifiers’ and it is because of their vagueness that populism has the potential to become a hegemonic discourse.

Populists change tack pretty regularly.

Laclau didn’t necessarily think of populism as a threat to democracy, arguing from the perspective of the left that it was actually necessary to develop a politics beyond the very concrete contradiction of class towards a discourse inclusive of the diverse political identities flourishing under conditions of late 20th and early 21st century capitalist modernity.

Yet he acknowledged before his death in 2014 that right-wing varieties of populism were on the rise, and that left-wing populists would likely be the exception for some time yet. How right (pun intended) he was.

Trump is of course the most obvious example of all, but Narendra Modi set the ball rolling a couple of years ago, evidence that well-developed democratic polity’s are as prone to populism as struggling ones such as ours. The potential election of far-right populists in France and Germany is confirmation of a powerful, although not irreversible, trend.

The AKP of Erdogan is another notable case which illustrates that elected populists can create such conditions that they generate legitimacy for authoritarianism. As long-suffering victims of an all-powerful army that has repeatedly thwarted our democracy, we celebrated ‘the Turkish people’ coming out onto the streets to repel an attempted coup some months ago.

Yet now it appears that the coup became the basis of a widespread purge within the state and media apparatuses that have made Turkey a less democratic country. Never­theless, Erdogan’s support base within the conservative and relatively affluent Anatolian heartland would appear to be secure and it is on the basis of this tyranny of the majority that Erdogan claims to have the backing of ‘the people’.

In surveying Pakistan’s recent history, it is worth noting that our first experiment with populism was the left-wing brand of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his PPP. Importantly, class constituencies such as industrial labour and the peasantry were highly mobilised at the time, and so it was the labouring poor rather than ‘the people’ that were the major protagonists in Bhutto’s scheme.

Arguably the first populist movement in Pakistan that conforms to Laclau’s typology was the MQM of Altaf Hussain. While his appeal was somewhat limited to the Urdu-speaking populations of urban Sindh, Altaf Hussain created a new discourse in which class divisions were downplayed in favour of a broader identity politics.

Religio-political movements since the late 1970s have also taken on an increasingly populist garb, in contradistinction to an earlier era when a closed circle of committed believers represented the faith. Mufti Mahmood and Qazi Hussain Ahmed were the first of their kinds — it can be argued that these ‘mainstream’ Islamists set the stage for a plethora of militant Islamists that perfected the art of millenarian populism. All of Pakistan’s military rulers have had populist pretensions, but none of them actually spearheaded organised political movements as such, and it was the entrenchment of the military institution that accorded them legitimacy rather than a populist programme per se.

Yet the Pakistani military does know a great deal about populists: it has either backed or opposed the different varieties that we have encountered over the years. The generals always hedge their bets, never quite giving any populist (or the movements they lead) enough rope to displace the army from its position of ‘guardian of the nation’.

To an extent, then, Pakistani populism is as much about winning and keeping the favour of the establishment as it is about ‘the people’ at large. It is a game which only ever has one winner. Harping on about ‘right and wrong’ will not change the outcome.

There is only one political alternative that could represent the needs of ‘the people’ who have no stakes in the prevailing political game — the left.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2016