L’Italia e le altre Antipolitica, populismo e nuove destre nella crisi delle democrazie europee

This article revisits Alfio Mastropaolo’s work to reconstruct the relationship between democratic crisis, anti-politics, and populism. It argues that these phenomena should not be treated as contingent or episodic, but as interconnected dimensions of a broader transformation of representative democracy. In this perspective, anti-politics is conceptualized both as a diffuse societal attitude and as a strategic repertoire that, once institutionalized, translates into populist mobilization. Populism thus emerges as a key form of crystallization of these dynamics. Building on this framework, the article proposes a typology based on the interaction between the construction of crisis and modes of mobilization, offering an analytical tool to examine contemporary populist configurations in comparative perspective, in line with Mastropaolo’s research agenda.