As the average psychologist knows – but politicians, scholars and the media still do not seem to comprehend – man is far from being a rationally thinking creature. What the protest generation of 1968 was aware of, what the current populist movements are also thoroughly aware of, is that politics involves more than public management and a rational assessment of interests. Some may have forgotten, but politics still always is imagination, the capacity to dream collectively, to tell stories; politics still always accommodates a form of mythology. If we want to take populism seriously as a political force, we must above all consider it in the light of these aspects. At the same time, we must ask ourselves the difficult question of why our own politics no longer appeal to the imagination.

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