25. Populism, Anti-populism and Post-truth

The debate around ‘post-truth’ dominated the public space following the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s electoral victory. Since then, one continuously encounters references that connect ‘post-truth’ and/or ‘fake news’ with populism and present both phenomena as mutually reinforcing pathologies of a supposed political normality. Mainstream politicians and prominent members of the media and the academic establishment seem to claim an epistemic superiority providing access to the only truth. In Greece, the dominant anti-populist discourse proceeded quickly to employ this polemical notion of ‘post-truth’. This paper aims to examine how post-truth politics were conceptualized in Greece, how they became part of political antagonism and how the rubric of post-truth was incorporated into the dominant populism/anti-populism cleavage that marks Greek politics. Through this examination of Greek politics, we attempt to highlight the political claims related to the polemical uses of the concept of ‘post-truth’ in political discourses more generally, namely the implications that can be produced by the interconnection between populism and post-truth. Given the many global uses of ‘post-truth’, this analysis could arguably have broader repercussions for populism research globally. Finally, the paper deals with the status of truth itself in politics.