Commencing from the reflections made by Ortega y Gasset in his striking work entitled Democrazia morbosa that the Spanish thinker published at the beginning of the twentieth century, Monica Simeoni analyzes the crisis of the contemporary democracy. A crisis accompanied by the inadequacies of the political parties and especially the inability of policy to address the collective action and to create new projects. However, it is precisely in times of increased political fatigue that we are witnessing a resurgence of populism that, in its various components, both right-wing and left-wing, produces destabilizing effects for the same democratic institutions. Faced with such a risk it seems necessary to rediscover the need to create positive realities for the future and to limit any possibility of action to the only will that is available today, that is, the will to destroy.
Keywords: Democracy, populism, contemporary society