Left Populism in Europe

Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos

Marina Prentoulis

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786806949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

This book evaluates the transformational process of left populism across grassroots, national and European levels and asks what we can do to harness the power of broad-based, popular left politics. While the right is using populist rhetoric to great effect, the left's attempts have been much less successful. Syriza in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain have both failed to introduce socialism in their countries, while Podemos has had better fortune in Spain and isnow in government with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Bringing a wealth of experience in political organising, Marina Prentoulis argues that left populism is a political logic that brings together isolated demands against a common enemy. She looks at how egalitarian pluralism could transform economic and political institutions in a radical, democratic direction. But each party does this differently, and the key to understanding where to go from here lies in a serious analysis of the roots of each movement's base, the forms of party organisation, and the particular national contexts. This book is a clear and holistic approach to left populism that will inform anyone wanting to understand and move forward positively in a bleak time for the left in Europe.

1
The Politics of Left Populism after the Global Financial Crisis

Left-populist parties started to make gains in Europe following the financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of the Indignados movements in Greece and Spain in 2011. The recession that followed the financial crisis led to the widespread adoption of strict austerity measures which sparked protests across the Southern European countries most badly affected. It is within this context that Podemos was formed in Spain in 2014, electing five members to the European Parliament that same year and becoming the third largest party at the national election the year after. Syriza, a small left coalition, became the main opposition party in Greece at the June 2012 national election and won the January 2015 election. Finally, the Labour Party’s membership surge during the 2015 leadership contest gave the previously marginalised left-winger Jeremy Corbyn a landslide victory.

For some this brought to mind the pink tide in Latin America a decade earlier. Behind the latter lay the imposition of policies designed to bring fiscal balance and international competitiveness to indebted countries and imposed by bodies like the IMF and the US Agency for International Development. These policies included privatisation of public services and companies and cuts to social spending. The rejection of these policies and the rise to power of left-wing governments in South America at the dawn of the millennium promised a different future, through distributive policies and an anti-imperialist message. The wave started with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The process accelerated as the world witnessed the collapse of the Argentinian economy and the extensive protests in the country in 2001 leading to the election of Néstor Kirchner in 2003, and with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president of Brazil in the same year, then to Bolivia in 2006 with Evo Morales and to Ecuador in 2007 with Rafael Correa.

These scenes in Argentina were to be repeated ten years later in Greece, as it became clear that the financial crisis of 2008 was to hit Southern Europe hardest: the fear that Greece would default on its huge debt (like Argentina had previously) led to long queues outside Greek banks and people concealing stashes of millions of euros – in tax havens for the wealthy, and under mattresses for those of more modest means.

The big lenders moved into Greece – the IMF, ECB and European Commission known as the Troika – imposing a remedy of the same poison: more neoliberalism, more austerity, more suffering.

In 2011 the people of Greece but also Spain (actually a few days earlier than in Greece) took to the streets, indignant, scared and determined to demand a different future. In Syntagma Square in Athens a huge banner was unveiled with an image of a yellow helicopter – a reference to Argentinian President Fernando de la Rúa fleeing the country by helicopter in 2001. From that moment the Greeks and Spanish were perceived to be the new protagonists of a European ‘pink tide’ – one that has not yet achieved the same scale of reform as the South American one, but is nevertheless clear in its demand for an alternative to neoliberalism. These new left populists – or as the right-wing populist media across Europe called them, the new ‘Chavistas’ – were perceived as a threat to the European status quo.

Why ‘left populists’? They were populists because as activists, as politicians and as parties they aimed to speak in the name of ‘the people’. And left because they were convinced that the mantra of TINA (which claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism) had to change.

We should, however, examine the concept of left populism more closely in order to dispel some of the misconceptions perpetuated by scholars and commentators alike. Left populism emerges in particular historical moments when the ‘establishment’ has lost the trust of the people. While the term ‘populism’ might bring to mind right-wing politicians, left populism hardly bares any resemblance to this when it comes to its programme and vision.

The Question of Representation

The 2008 crisis revealed the faults of the neoliberal economic system, which had permitted a few people to become obscenely wealthy through risk taking and speculation, while producing nothing tangible. This gang of financiers had never pledged their allegiance to democracy, nor to the good of the people of the countries affected. Elected politicians, however, could not escape accountability that easily, and so what started as a financial crisis rapidly became a crisis of political representation.

Representation is not a straightforward concept in political theory. In its everyday use it is understood as reflecting a reality (as in ‘representation’ in media) but also sometimes as one thing standing in for something else. To take an example from the 2019 UK general election campaign, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to take part in a TV debate on climate change his seat on the Channel 4 programme was occupied by a block of melting ice. This was obviously a joke, but still the block of ice was ‘representing’, standing for, Johnson’s position on climate change, silent while a catastrophe was taking place.

In politics the operation of representation is far from innocent and open to confusion. Think of the media representation of women, for example. When feminist theorists were analysing women’s magazines in the 1960s and 1970s they found that women were represented in stereotypical terms, for example as being interested only in domestic life. This was a ‘misrepresentation’ of women, reducing them to roles assisting a system of domination set up by men.¹ This type of representation rests on how well something is described, which in the example I gave is a distorted, inaccurate or partial representation. (I am sure some people would argue the same about the block of ice incident.)

Politicians can also misrepresent, distort or manipulate the desires of the people they are supposed to represent. Political representation, however, involves an action: doing something for those one represents implies pursuing the interests of those represented. It implies on the one hand authority (citizens must give their consent to those who represent them), while on the other hand it implies that those who have consented can hold the representatives accountable for their actions.²

The crisis of representation after the financial crisis stems from these two dimensions of political representation. First, the consent people had given to their elected representatives broke down as news spread of the scale of financial speculation and how badly it had imperilled the global economy. Second, by protesting in the streets and showing the scale of their indignation, as people did in Greece and Spain in 2011, they were holding their political representatives accountable for not pursuing the interests of those they represented.

Here we can turn to Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism to further examine the relationship between representative and represented. When we talk about representation we do not only talk about the process of institutional representation, such as in parliament, but also about other political actors, such as a social movement that ‘represents’ the people, or a part of it – later on in this chapter I discuss what we mean by ‘the people’ and how it comes to being as an entity. There is also a more performative dimension here: when a movement, for example, says that it represents the people, or ‘speaks for the people’, it brings ‘the people’ into being by doing so. The movement creates the object it represents.

At this point I usually refer to the example of Lenin (think of another leader if you prefer) addressing the people with the phrase: ‘You, the working class … ’. Isn’t he at that point creating this entity, the ‘working class’? This does not mean that the people in front of him didn’t exist before he said it, nor that the working class wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t said it. But by saying it, the people – here, the working class – come into being as a political subject that will act in this historical moment. The working class as a political actor is a point of contention between traditional Marxists and neo- or post-Marxists, so let me stress here that the relationship of representation I am describing is not one-directional. Lenin could have claimed whatever he wanted, but if his claim wasn’t taken up by the people he addressed – if the people didn’t understand themselves as ‘the working class’ – he wouldn’t be representing much. Representation, then, is a multidimensional process: from the represented to the representative and vice versa.³

The reason populist leaders can in some cases claim convincingly that they represent ‘the people’ is that the people themselves have accepted their claim. After all, anyone can claim that they represent someone. It becomes believable only when the subject to be represented says ‘yes, this person represents me’. Only then does any leader’s attempt at representing the people gain actual political power. The claims that populism is nothing more than manipulation by a leader are therefore a bit simplistic. There must be the conditions, the demands and the desire of the people in order for a leader to convincingly claim they represent ‘the people’. As with any democratic process it is not only about an imposition from the top – thus, populist representation is less top down than assumed. If the claim is not embraced by the people, then we have a failed populist project, which may be interesting for academics but has very limited political consequences.

Does populism require a leader, then? Among those interested in populism, some seem more interested in starting not with a leader or a party at election time, but with grassroots activity and movements expressing demands against the establishment. Some call this ‘grassroots populism’⁴ and see in populism a radical, democratic, left-wing potential. But often a leader becomes the face and voice of a populist project, and for this reason their personality and speeches for example are of interest. They are bringing the populist project to life, so to speak.

Populism and representation are seen in a negative light for some contemporary theorists such as Jan-Werner Müller. He claims that ‘the people’ according to populists are a ‘homogeneous’ entity – a claim that, if true, would make populists blind to the diversity of demands and identities involved in a populist project. But the populist theorists (and political actors) we are discussing here have not made such a claim. Despite Müller’s attempt to discredit them, they would argue against him, stressing the complexity and differentiation among ‘the people’, which can make the formation of this kind of collectivity a difficult process.⁵

Müller’s assumption is that populism, as a top-down political project, is not serious in understanding and enabling the participation of the people. This may be the case for right-wing populists (although as I said earlier the people have to accept to be represented by these populists) but not for many left-populist projects.

No one can deny however that populism is a controversial label. The issue of populist representation becomes more complex if we look at it as a metaphorical rather than ‘real’ entity. Theorists and journalists with either a left- or a right-wing agenda often use the term ‘populist’ as something that is less than ‘real’ and is more in keeping with the symbolic – in extreme cases, merely a synonym for manipulation. Müller, for example, juxtaposes democratic representation (which liberal democratic institutions offer, according to him) and symbolic representation (what populists rely on).⁶ He insists that because populists rely on this symbolic type of representation the populist people are not real, and the populist leaders do not really want them to participate continuously in the political community that the leader claims to represent.⁷ In his view the populist people is a passive and manipulated people.

The question that persists is: who are ‘the people’? The concept of ‘the people’ is less closely examined and questioned, though it is often defined according to concepts such as national identity. However, isn’t this another imaginary construction? The ‘nation’ is more or less a eighteenth-century invention, albeit one with very real consequences such as the wars waged in the name of one or other national interest. In populism (though there are differences between right-wing and left-wing discourses) ‘the people’ is often constructed around the idea of a nation. Equally important is who is excluded, who is not part of this nation, and this changes according to place, time and circumstances. The ‘enemy’ of the nation can be the corrupt elites, a foreign power, immigrants and refugees or all of the above.

Let us look closer at how ‘the people’ come into being. At the beginning there are diverse demands which progressively start to have the same target and become represented by the same party or leader. In this respect these diverse demands start to come together, forming what we could metaphorically call a chain, a chain that unites them in a common struggle. This is how diverse groups of people with different grievances, potentially from different classes, come together to create ‘a people’. Are these ‘people’ a homogeneous entity, as Müller and other theorists have argued? Not really, and this is why I said they formed a chain rather than an undifferentiated mass. Grievances and demands come together in a situation where previous affiliations have broken down and now they are looking for a new name to represent them – to represent the chain as a whole. This name not only represents but constitutes the new entity. On the one hand, this name will represent each link of the chain. On the other hand, it will simultaneously act as the point of identification for each of the links.⁸ To give an example: the name representing the different grievances in 2011 in Greece and Spain was ‘Indignados’. The name allowed all of the different demands to connect under this umbrella at the same time, by having a name the Indignados came into being.

This process is the double movement of representation I described earlier: something else (here a name) represents the object, but at the same time the object has to identify with the name too. Though it is not necessarily a person, this name acts as a label that b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why Left Populism?
• 1 The Politics of Left Populism after the Global Financial Crisis
• 2 Grassroots Resistance, Austerity and the ‘Populist Moment’
• 3 Creating a Party for the Twenty-First Century: New Parties, New Structures?
• 4 Left Populism at Elections: Rhetoric and Programmes
• 5 The Institutionalisation of the Populist Promise
• 6 Europe and Its ‘Peoples’: Negotiating Sovereignty
• Conclusion: Where We Are Today with Left Populism
• Notes
• Index