Populists in Power

Daniele Albertazzi, Duncan McDonnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317535027
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The main area of sustained populist growth in recent decades has been Western Europe, where populist parties have not only endured longer than expected, but have increasingly begun to enter government. Focusing on three high-profile cases in Italy and Switzerland – the Popolo della Libertà (PDL), Lega Nord (LN) and Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) – Populists in Power is the first in-depth comparative study to examine whether these parties are indeed doomed to failure in office as many commentators have claimed.

Albertazzi and McDonnell's findings run contrary to much of the received wisdom. Based on extensive original research and fieldwork, they show that populist parties can be built to last, can achieve key policy victories and can survive the experience of government, without losing the support of either the voters or those within their parties.

Contributing a new perspective to studies in populist politics, Populists in Power is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars interested in modern government, parties and politics.

1 From periphery to power

Populists in Western Europe

On 31 January 2000, 14 of the 15 European Union (EU) member states issued an ultimatum to the remaining member, Austria. If the centre-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP – Austrian People’s Party) pressed ahead with plans to form a government containing the right-wing populist Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ – Austrian Freedom Party) – whose values were deemed to be in conflict with those of the EU – bilateral sanctions would be imposed.¹ According to subsequent accounts, the threat of sanctions was intended to make the ÖVP reconsider its plans – the 14 did not, apparently, think they would have to match their words with action (Larsson and Lundgren, 2005). As it turned out, the ÖVP did not back down, the FPÖ duly took its place in the new coalition government, and Austria found itself ‘a pariah within the EU’ (Merlingen et al., 2001: 60). Its time as an outcast lasted until September 2000, when a report by the three ‘wise men’ mandated by the European Court of Human Rights said there were no problems with Austria’s human rights record and that ‘the overall performance of the Ministers of the FPÖ in Government since February 2000 cannot be generally criticized’ (Ahtisaari et al., 2000: 30). Keen to avoid a repeat of what had been an embarrassing impasse, the member states agreed to adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach to any similar situations in the future.

The Austrian case and the international controversy it aroused serves to remind us of how much has changed in the past 15 years as regards populists and government participation. Although populist parties had been growing electorally in Western Europe since the early 1970s, the only two cases of populists in power in the ensuing 30 years were the left-wing Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima (PASOK – Panhellenic Socialist Movement) governments in Greece after 1981 and the short-lived right-wing government in Italy led by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994, which contained both Forza Italia (FI) and the Lega Nord (LN – Northern League).² By contrast, since the turn of the new century, populists have either served in – or provided consistent parliamentary support as part of formal pacts for – governments in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Greece.³ As Figure 1.1 (overleaf) shows, while many Western European countries have not yet had populist parties in or even close to power (although only a few now lack electorally successful ones), populists are certainly not on the periphery of power in all.

Figure 1.1 Western European governments containing populists (or having established formal pacts with them to ensure a parliamentary majority) since 2000.

The move of populists from periphery to power in Western Europe raises questions not only for domestic elites and supranational institutions, but also for political scientists. As Cas Mudde (2013: 15) notes, citing the title of an important article on the topic by Reinhard Heinisch (2003), there has been a ‘dominant strain in the populism literature that argues that populist parties are destined for success in opposition and failure in government’. This was certainly the case towards the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s. To take just two prominent examples: in perhaps her most famous article on populism, Margaret Canovan (1999: 12) claimed that if a populist party ‘actually gets into power, its own inability to live up to its promises will be revealed’ and it will consequently lose support. Adopting a similarly negative view, Yves Mény and Yves Surel (2002: 18) argued in the introduction to their landmark volume Democracies and the Populist Challenge that ‘populist parties are by nature neither durable nor sustainable parties of government. Their fate is to be integrated into the mainstream, to disappear, or to remain permanently in opposition’. These views in turn echo another which has often been expressed in the literature by key scholars: that populism tends to be episodic (Taggart, 2004: 270).

The research project on which this book is based set out to examine whether, after more than a decade in which populists have not only grown electorally, but increasingly participated in (or supported) governments, the claims about them being doomed to failure hold true. In the ensuing chapters, we therefore look in detail at the cases of three populist parties which have served in government in Italy and Switzerland – the Popolo della Libertà (PDL – People of Freedom) and the Lega Nord in Italy, and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP – Swiss People’s Party). Having extensively discussed their organizations and ideologies in Chapters 2–4, we then assess how they fared in elections (Chapter 5), whether they indeed lived up to their promises when in office (Chapter 6), and how elected representatives and grassroots members saw their participation in government (Chapter 7). We do so not only by closely scrutinizing party manifestos, key texts, and policies, but also through intensive fieldwork conducted in Italy and Switzerland. This comprises individual and group interviews with over 100 representatives and members, along with surveys at party events. Given its analytical and methodological scope, we believe this book therefore provides the most comprehensive study to date of populists in power.

Our findings run contrary to much of the received wisdom. Populist parties are neither inevitably episodic nor are they destined to failure in government. As regards their being episodic, while some populist parties may be flash parties or personal parties (McDonnell, 2013a), others have established structures and grassroots organizations that have remained in place for decades and are built to last beyond the current leadership. Moreover, when in government, populists have shown that they can introduce key policies in line with their core ideologies and election promises. Crucially, they have also shown that they can survive the experience of government, despite the inevitable compromises and disappointments this brings, without losing the support of either the voters or those within their parties. In other words, while the Austrian case may have been a defining moment in the history of Western European populism, the traumatic subsequent experience of the FPÖ in government (Heinisch, 2003; Luther, 2011) is not necessarily that of all Western European populists.⁴

Populism

As Benjamin Moffitt and Simon Tormey (2014: 382) have noted, not only is it ‘an axiomatic feature of literature on the topic to acknowledge the contested nature of populism’, but recent work on populism ‘has reached a whole new level of meta-reflexivity, where it is posited that it has become common to acknowledge the acknowledgement of this fact’. We see no need to dwell on these terminological disputes other than to say that, like many political science concepts, populism has suffered at the hands of journalists, politicians, and scholars. The myriad and contradictory ways in which the media uses the term have been well documented (Bale et al., 2011), while Peter Wiles’s comment that ‘to each his own definition of populism, according to the academic axe he grinds’ continues to have a certain validity over 40 years after he wrote it (Wiles, 1969: 166). Hence, we find that among both media commentators and academics, ‘populism’ is often employed in inconsistent and undefined ways to denote any kind of appeal to the people, mild rebukes of elites, crowd-pleasing measures, and ‘catch-all’ politics.⁵ Adding to the confusion surrounding the term within academia, scholars from different parts of the world tend to view their populists as the archetypal ones and to define populism accordingly. For example, Kurt Weyland (2001: 14) asserts that ‘populism is best defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’. However, while this may fit cases of Latin American populism (on which Weyland is an expert), it does not apply to many well-organized populist parties in Western Europe.

Despite the disagreements over definitions, there are some core elements which most scholars would agree are ever-present among populists. First and foremost: the juxtaposition between ‘people’ and ‘elites’. As Canovan (1981: 294) observes, ‘all forms of populism without exception involve some kind of exaltation of and appeal to “the people” and all are in one sense or another anti-elitist’. Moreover, there is a moral dimension to this which is expressed in Manichean terms: whether of Left or Right, what unites populists is the fundamental proposition that a ‘good’ people is suffering due to the deliberate actions of a ‘bad’ set of elites. This is the basis for what has surely been the most widely used definition of populism in recent years: that by Cas Mudde, which he first presented in his 2004 article ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’. In it, Mudde defines populism as ‘an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’ (2004: 544). Although, as we discuss below, we have reservations about Mudde’s description of ‘the elite’ as a single homogeneous group, we feel the rest of his definition can serve as a useful minimal definition of populism.

Nonetheless, while we agree that all forms of populism – whether Left or Right – are characterized by an antagonistic relationship between a ‘good people’ and a ‘bad elite’, we believe there is another element that must be included when defining right-wing populism: ‘others’. This is because, for right-wing populists, ‘the people’ are said not only to be oppressed by the elites, but also to be under threat from the presence of ‘others’ within society who do not share the identity and/or values of ‘the people’ (and are alleged to be favoured by the elites against the people). Since the cases we examine in this book are all broadly right-wing parties (albeit different kinds of right-wing, as we explain in Chapters 2–4), it is important to make clear from the start exactly how we define right-wing populism.⁶ We understand this as:

A thin-centred ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.⁷

It is worth devoting some attention to the main components of this definition. First of all, we consider populism to be an ideology, in line with an increasing trend in the literature. As Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2013: 498) note, over the past decade ‘a growing group of social scientists has defined populism predominantly by making use of an “ideational approach”, conceiving it as discourse, ideology, or world-view’. To be clear as regards what we mean by ‘ideology’, we follow Martin Seliger’s conception of ideologies as ‘sets of ideas by which men [sic] posit, explain, and justify ends and means of organized social action with the aim to preserve, amend, uproot, or rebuild a given reality’ (Seliger, 1970: 325). We also agree with those who view populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’ (Mudde, 2007; Stanley, 2008) that is found alongside ‘thick’ ideologies of Left and Right or with other thin ones (like nationalism, for example). Hence, a party may be ‘right-wing populist’, ‘radical right populist’, ‘regionalist populist’, ‘left-wing populist’, and so on. But, ideologically, it is never simply ‘populist’.

As mentioned above, a key component for all populist ideologies is the notion of a ‘good people’. For populists, the people constitutes a homogeneous and inherently virtuous community – with ‘community’ being a place where, as Zygmunt Bauman (2001: 12) explains, there is mutual trust and ‘it is crystal-clear who is one of us and who is not’. Although there is little confusion for individual populist parties about who their ‘people’ is, the term can have different meanings for different types of populists. Mény and Surel (2004: 173–196) identify three separate populist understandings of ‘the people’: as a class, as a nation, and as a sovereign. Of these three, it is ‘the people as sovereign’ in our view which is the always-present key feature of populism in democracies. ‘The people as nation’ and ‘the people as class’ may also both be present (this is the case for the left-wing nationalist populist Sinn Féin in Ireland), but they are not always so (for example, Berlusconi’s parties have had no conception of ‘the people as class’). While ‘the people’ is said to be the rightful sovereign, populists claim that this sovereignty has been taken away from the people by the elites. That brings us to another important aspect of populist ideology: the people is cast as a victim, inevitably of the elites and, for right-wing populists, also of ‘the others’. This has two main implications: first, the people is not responsible for the country’s many ills (in this sense, populists offer a form of exculpation – their message is: ‘the situation is terrible, but it is not your fault’); second, the primary solution to those ills is to make ‘the blameless people’ sovereign once more (by putting the populist party into power).

By contrast, the enemies of the people – the elites (for all populists) and ‘the others’ (for right-wing populists) – are neither homogeneous nor virtuous. The former usually consist of a mixture of political, financial, economic, media, bureaucratic, judicial, cultural, and intellectual elites who are charged with being, at best, distant from the people and incompetent (and, at worst, downright corrupt). As we have said, we disagree with Mudde’s representation of the elites as a homogeneous block for populists. First of all, as Mudde himself and Kaltwasser (2013: 503) have acknowledged, populists make exceptions for those parts of the elites that are sympathetic to them (for example, in the media). Second, it is also the case that, for populist parties that have been around for several decades – and especially those that have served in national or subnational governments – the relationship with elites (whom they have to deal with far more regularly than when in opposition) becomes increasingly complex, and populists are often therefore forced to distinguish between ‘bad’ and ‘not-so-bad’ elites. For example, both Berlusconi and Christoph Blocher of the SVP do not treat all economic elites with the same disdain as they do political or media ones. As for ‘the others’ – a central element of right-wing populist ideology – their identity differs from case to case, but they too are not a homogeneous group. Rather, they are made up of those whose identity, behaviour, or beliefs preclude them from being considered part of the natural community formed by the people. For right-wing populists in Western Europe, the ‘others’ include immigrants first and foremost (and, in particular since 9/11, Muslims), but can also comprise ‘welfare scroungers’, regional minorities, those with ‘non-traditional’ lifestyles, communists, and so on. All of these are said to want to impose their values and traditions on the people and, in this endeavour, they alledgedly receive the support of liberal elites such as politicians, the judiciary, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 From periphery to power: populists in Western Europe
• 2 Forza Italia and the Popolo della Libertà
• 3 The Lega Nord
• 4 The Schweizerische Volkspartei
• 5 Elections
• 6 Pledges vs actions in government
• 7 Members’ and representatives’ reactions to government participation
• 8 Conclusions: populists and power
• Appendix 1: Summary of relevant political events in Italy, 2008–2011
• Appendix 2: Summary of relevant political events in Switzerland, 2003–2007
• Index