Abstract

How do the populist regimes of the democracies and the authoritarian ones of the sovereign type relate to the nationalism that dominated above all the first part of the twentieth century and caused its greatest tragedies? After a brief analysis of what nationalism was in the nineteenth century and especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, the article examines the populist tradition in particular in Latin America and tries to identify the characteristics of the populist sovereignty present today in numerous regimes and countries, a phenomenon typical especially of the  st century. A comparison is established between the current trends (from those in Poland and Hungary to those in Venezuela, Russia and Turkey) and the authoritarian (and even fascist) ones of the 1920s and 1930s, identifying in the rejection of a constitutional logic of checks and balances the most significant similarity. The character of sovereignty is above all to emphasize the role of the state, while that of nationalism was to accentuate that of the nation.