The nature of populist power through the lens of constitutional lawyers

This essay firstly gives a brief account of the increasing diffusion of ‘hybrid regimes’ and of the main symptoms of the malaise affecting constitutional democracies. Then, the legitimacy recognised to populist parties and governments in a constitutional democracy should be confronted with the former’s tendency to establish a regime where adversaries are instead delegitimized as such. The structural asymmetry between constitutional democracies and populist regimes could be overcome through a recovery of democratic politics aimed at addressing the systemic difficulties that put the premises for the rising of a “populist constitutionalism”.