L’Uomo qualunque: Life, Contradictions and Death of an Antipolitical Populism, 1944-1948

The Italian political movement of L’Uomo qualunque, which is not very well known, is often described in Italy as the prototype of contemporary populism. In order to understand it, it seems necessary to recall the context of the emergence of the movement and the ideology of its founder, Guglielmo Giannini. This ideology was both very personal and representative of an anti-antifascism that was deeply rooted in the southern middle classes after the Liberation. It was the originality of this political proposal that made the movement so successful, at its peak between 1945 and 1946, as well as its innovative communication. However, the political proposal also had its weaknesses and came up against the ambiguity of an anti-political policy on the one hand, and the bipolarisation of the political world at the time of the start of the Cold War on the other. The movement thus appears to be representative, not of a hypothetical archetype of populism, but rather of “populist moments” that arise from a correspondence, often of fairly short duration, between the diffuse contestation of the political system and the movement that claims to be its exclusive interpreter.