Is Populism a Threat to Democracy?

by Rebecca Thomas-Snell

In the final week of term, 10X English welcomed Dr Cotton and Dr Purves to judge their debate, ‘Populism is a threat to democracy’. With Mahir Asef and Jayne Cheung proposing the motion, they argued that despite Populism’s aim to appeal to the masses, it can equate to a dictatorship that offers nothing other than a thin veil masking the abuse of power founded in fallible arguments. Populism is simply the false belief that there are easy solutions to complex issues and often these require the exclusion of minority groups.

The opposition was made up of Holly Giles and Tom Shahran who postulated that Populism can be an installation of hope for ordinary people in a society currently run by the elite. Often those who are populist leaders have been members of the working class and have laboured for their role, such as Evo Morales. Resultantly, is it not obvious that we should employ greater trust in someone who has life experience prior to leadership?

It was a tough-run battle with some excellent questions from the floor including: the relationship between economic trust on a global front in light of a populist leader, what we should learn from history and how a democracy can function without accountability. The questions from Dr Cotton and Dr Purves were challenging but both teams approached them with aplomb and gave convincing responses.

Dr Purves offered, ‘It was wonderful to hear the passion with which the pupils spoke, both those directly debating the motion and the members of the audience.  It was also really impressive to see how much preparation and fact-checking had gone in to the arguments on both sides of the debate. Both teams did really well to maintain the consistency of their arguments in the face of robust challenge’ Ultimately the decision to declare Mahir and Jayne the winning duo was due to ‘the slight difference in consistency, and the calm manner maintained by one of the speakers which enabled a victor to be chosen; although it really was incredibly difficult to pick a winner.’

I would like to thank all pupils in the class for their hard work in preparing and ultimately making this challenging debate such a success.