PERSPECTIVE Democratic Expeditions The scarecrow of communism: Understanding and confronting anti-­communist rhetoric in contemporary politics Carlos Meléndez Introduction: the global return of an antiquated ghost Far-right actors in both Europe and Latin America have conjured a familiar spectre back into being: communism. To be sure, not communism as an active political force, but rather as a symbolic scarecrow or bogeyman, in­voked strategically in an attempt to delegitimise oppo­nents, not just at the extremes, but across the political spectrum, encompassing even moderate centrist forces. And such anti-communist rhetoric is not a marginal or outdated phenomenon, but central to how the contem­porary far right is framing its designated enemies, draw­ing on cultural trauma, ideological polarisation and the emotive power of fear. Take Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. At one rally she jumped around on stage, leading the chant of »chi non salta comunista è«(»anyone not jumping[with the implication, ›together with us‹] is a communist«), per­haps echoing Cold War-style exclusionary fervour. In Chile, to take another example, José Antonio Kast’s campaign jingle warned of so-called »cincomunismo«, a neologism merging his number on the electoral ballot, five( »cinco« in Spanish) with an anti-communist mes­sage. And these are scarcely isolated provocations. From France to Peru, anti-communism is a core discur­sive weapon wielded by the far right to stigmatise re­formist, environmentalist, feminist or even centrist agendas. But is it only the far right that is deploying anti-com­munist rhetoric? More fundamentally, what does»an­ti-communism« even mean today, particularly at the level of individual attitudes? Conceptualising anti-communism: two faces of the same coin To grasp the contemporary relevance of anti-com­munism, we can start by distinguishing two dimen­sions: The scarecrow of communism 1