Populism

The COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the hands of authoritarian regimes. Unlike those who have claimed that the outbreak tends to accelerate the movement toward greater geopolitical competition, we argue that the pandemic has necessitated further cooperation between democratic and authoritarian governments, thus enhancing the longevity of the latter. This explains why the global pandemic has caused no fundamental changes in the regional security dynamics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), in part because it has ironically prolonged the rule of authoritarian in the region in the name of providing public health. Despite the rhetoric of religious pluralism, moderation, as well as constitutional reforms, sentiments echoing narrow and virulent nationalism and right-wing populism have simultaneously prevailed. On balance, the persistent use of repression in liberalized autocracies in the region has manifested itself in the form of repressing protesters during tough economic times.  For example, in protests against unemployment in Oman in 2018 or against tax reform in Jordan in 2019, and during Saudi Arabia’s 2017-20 Qatif unrest or in Algeria’s ongoing political protests, such patterns of behavior have been visible.  Even in those regimes that have introduced constitutional reforms in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, when priority has been given to combating a global pandemic, a floundering economy, and other emerging threats, such as the campaign against terrorism, authoritarian regimes have wound up consolidating their rule, thus exploiting such crises in order to grab further power at home and seek geopolitical advantage in the region.  However, it is short-sighted to underestimate the possibility of the spontaneous eruption of popular uprisings that could pose a destabilizing threat to authoritarian regimes at some point in the future.

The idea of populism or Narodniki in Russia has received less attention in Iran because it has been placed in the shadow of Russian communist leftist ideas. Conceptually, this idea is far beyond populism and Russian communism, and has had wide-ranging effects both in Russia and outside of this country. How this thought has been able to be so in-fluential is the main issue in this article that the authors have tried to analyze with the aim of investigating its roots, dimensions and consequences. In fact, the main question is how populist thought appeared in Russia and why did it become an effective and wide-spread trend? The hypothesis of this article is that the idea of populism emerged as a reaction to the neglect of the role of the people in the political life of Russia in the sec-ond half of the 19th century, and because of its acceptance by intellectuals and based on a combination of three British constitutional and democratic views. French socialism and Russian nativism were spread. To investigate this hypothesis, we have used the ana-lytical-descriptive method of political thoughts from the perspective of Thomas Spra-gens and in a qualitative format. The finding of this article is that social issues have aris-en and the intellectual responses of thinkers, despite their own timeliness, have been re-produced in a way for centuries and are still useful and very important for understanding the social and political conditions of the periods after that.