Latin America is not quite like other continents, politically speaking. Currently both Venezuela and Brazil are in the news, the first convulsed by economic meltdown, the second by political crisis. They breed a special type of political leader there, as a quick look at Bolivia and Argentina also show. The usual word used to evoke the political landscape is “populism”, a term that is also being used in Europe of the policies of people like Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen, and in America as well of Donald Trump, and could equally apply to several situations in Africa in the not too recent past. But just what is populism? This article in the Economist is 10 years old, but provides a good answer, as well as showing that little has changed in Latin America over the last decade. There are certain common threads to populism. The first is the presence of a charismatic leader, who has mass appeal, who is much loved of the distracted multitude, and who relies greatly on rhetorical flourishes rather than dry as dust policy exposition. The second is the forging of a movement that is supposed to leap over class divides: this means that populists somehow combine a belief in anti-capitalism without embracing classical socialism, but rather split the difference between the two, or somehow combine them, generally using the glue of nationalism. Populism tends to pose as the movement of the masses against the tyranny of elites, though it soon creates elites of its own, as the Economist wisely points out. Finally, populism makes promises that cannot be delivered, and in the end leads to a worse situation than the one it set out to solve, as has clearly been the case in Venezuela. As far as I can see there has never been a populist movement that didn’t end in disaster. As the Economist observes of the Latin American variety: