LEFT-WING POPULISM

What is Left populism? In this book, OscarGarcıa Agustın analyzes the Left populistmovements of the last decade, showinghow Left populism provides a distinctlanguage and strategy for the EuropeanLeft, distinguishing it from both right-wingpopulism and from the old Left. The bookcovers political topics such as migration,nationalism, and sovereignty, and analyzesthe organizational challenges that a Leftpopulist movement faces. Left-WingPopulism: The Politics of the People offersthe first systematic book-length account ofLeft populism. It should be compulsoryreading for anyone interested in the futureof the Left.

Lasse Thomassen, Queen Mary University of Londonand University of Copenhagen

The last few decades were marked by thecrisis of neoliberalism and the rise ofpopulist politics but despite the spilled inkfew have managed to explain with claritythis conjuncture.

The author manages to do exactly that: notonly does he dispel with a lot ofmisconception about populism but he alsooffers a fascinating mapping of the trajectoryof left populism and an inspiring blueprintfor future politics.

Dr Marina Prentoulis, University of East Anglia, UK

LEFT-WING POPULISM

The Politics of the People

OSCAR GARCIA AGUST IN

Aalborg University, Denmark

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – IndiaMalaysia – China

Emerald Publishing LimitedHoward House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

© 2020 Oscar Garcıa AgustınPublished under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions serviceContact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise withouteither the prior written permission of the publisher or a licencepermitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The CopyrightLicensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright ClearanceCenter. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those ofthe authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure thequality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes norepresentation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’suitability and application and disclaims any warranties,express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83909-206-0 (Print)ISBN: 978-1-83909-203-9 (Online)ISBN: 978-1-83909-205-3 (Epub)

CONTENTS

About the Author vii

Why Left-Wing Populism? 1

1. The Left-Wing Populist Wave in Europe 13

2. The People and Popular Sovereignty 33

3. Class and Migration 47

4. Nationalism and Patriotism 65

5. Institutions and Republicanism 81

6. Sovereignism and Transnationalism 99

Five Dilemmas of Left-Wing Populism 115

References 125

Index 149

v

This page intentionally left blank

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oscar Garcıa Agustın is Associate Professor at the Depart-ment of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University,Denmark. He is head of the DEMOS (Democracy, Migration,and Movements) research group. He works on populism,social movements, and migration. With Christian Ydesen hehas coedited the book Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Commonand its Powers (Peter Lang, 2013), and with Martin BakJørgensen he has coedited Politics of Dissent (2015, PeterLang) and Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspec-tives on Migration and Civil Society (Pluto Press, 2016).Together with Marco Briziarelli he has coedited Podemos andthe New Political Cycle. Left-Wing Populism and Anti-Establishment Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He isauthor of Sociology of Discourse: From Institutions to SocialChange (John Benjamins, 2015) and coauthor together withMartin Bak Jørgensen of Solidarity and the “Refugee Crisis”in Europe (Palgrave Pivot, 2018).

vi i

This page intentionally left blank

WHY LEFT-WING POPULISM?

It is becoming a kind of commonplace that every piece ofwriting on populism starts by questioning the usefulness ofthe term due to its vague and ambiguous meaning, both inacademia and in the public and political debate. Not onlythat, its use frequently is pejorative and applied to discreditthose who are portrayed as populist. Not many politiciansdefine themselves as populists but rather hurry to call theiradversaries populists instead. Although the concept is rejec-ted, due to its inability to explain the political reality, itparadoxically continues to generate more and more articlesand books and be the object of reflection. Populism accountssometimes for a general and common phenomenon, beingglobal and affecting both the left and the right, and othertimes a common but differentiated phenomenon for left andright. The focus on the similarities between right- and left-wing populism has not contributed to clarifying the term butinstead to increasing the negative view that some authors orpoliticians, belonging to the left spectrum, have on populismas a progressive political project. They wonder why theyshould talk about left-wing populism when there is anextended agreement that populism is something bad. All inall, populism provokes, in general, a dual rejection: frommainstream politics and from left politics.

1

The main controversy awoken by populism is what can besummarized as its alleged opposition to liberal democracy.From this perspective, there is no distinction between rightand left, given that both sides question the essence of liberaldemocracy: the representative system and the constitutionaland institutional realm. For this reason, populism is accusedof being a threat to democracy while mainstream partiesreact to safeguard the pillars of the democratic system. Froma left perspective, populism is regarded with skepticism sinceit would imply abandoning the emancipatory project of theleft as well as the attempt to change the neoliberal system.The liberal position leaves intact any critique of the repre-sentative, and the crisis of the values on which it is grounded,and makes it even difficult to imagine any other alternative toit (Ranciere, 2016). The demands for political change andmore democracy, coming from civil society and socialmovements, barely have the option to resonate in the polit-ical system. The socialist position is linked with the crisis ofthe left, more specifically the radical left, to forge its ownideological project, which has been in crisis since the fall ofthe Soviet Union, and reveals its need to be reconsidered afterthe crisis of the neoliberal system in 2008. The crisis has notled to a spectacular expansion of the political space of theradical left.

This book is no exception to the genre on populism andstarts with the acknowledgment of the ambiguity and vague-ness intrinsic to the concept. However, I believe that it is stilluseful and necessary to think about populism and its impli-cation in current politics. Specifically, it can be fruitful toreflect on and analyze populism from its ideological position,in this case from the left, rather than conceptualizing populismas an overall phenomenon across ideologies. I am not arguingthat there are no similarities, because there are, but the dif-ferences are significant and can be explained by the parties

2 Left-Wing Populism

belonging to the left or right axis. In other words, the populistarticulation differs substantially if it is made from the left orthe right. Thus, the objective of this book is to conceptualizeand analyze left-wing populism as a political project devel-oped from the left which embraces populism. Left-wingpopulism cannot imply that we can identify “pure” forms ofpopulism or that populism is the only component defining theleft. Yannis Stavrakakis (2017) points out that populisminvolves a series of contradictory articulations that imply aplurality of populist hybrids where what is at stake is thespecific profile of the populism emerging within a context.Hybridity itself is a feature shared by all forms of populism(Zienkowski & Breeze, 2019), and this is applicable to thevarieties of the left too. It would be wrong to look atthe populist turn of radical parties as the total assumption ofthe populist logic instead of as the coexistence of populist andradical forms and traditions. The focus on (hybrid) left-wingpopulism highlights the importance of taking diverse socio-political contexts into account in order to understand howpopulism is embedded within different left-wing traditions.Therefore, addressing the specificities of left-wing populismcan contribute to understanding the recent emergence ordevelopment of the left and the existence of multiple andvaluable debates on the alternatives to neoliberalism, themulticultural societies, or the role of the nation in globaliza-tion times. Left-wing populism is not a “pure” or fixedconcept, or an unproblematic one, but it is necessary to graspthe multiple debates and crossroads faced by the left insearching for its own identity.

The reflections on left-wing populism draw mainly on theEuropean situation, particularly after the crisis of 2008 withfocus on the political parties which embraced, more or lessexplicitly, left-wing populism (or a form of left politicsdistinguishable from the radical left and close to some

Why Left-Wing Populism? 3

populist features), and on the political and academic debatesgenerated around the populist strategy. It does not mean thatwe should ignore the previous experiences of the LatinAmerican left-wing populism given its influence both theo-retically and politically. It would also be naıve not tomention that the main interest in populism, despite havingexisted before, has been provoked by phenomena like theBrexit and the electoral victory of Donald Trump. I will referto the far right and (radical) right wing indistinctly, althoughI am aware of the differences and the variety of positionsaround it. Focusing on left-wing populism, it is pertinent toexplain, first of all, the emergence of the “populist moment”and later the definition of left-wing populism as a politicalphenomenon.

THE POPULIST MOMENT

Before the economic crisis, the idea of the populist Zeitgeistwas used to explain the emergence of contemporary populism,both from the left and right, in Europe. In the beginning of the2000s, Cas Mudde (2004) referred to the causes of thepopulist Zeitgeist and pointed to some perceptions, ratherthan facts, on the increasing corruption of the elites and theseparation between “the people” and “the elite.” This trendwas not only attributable to the right wing but also to the left.Luke March and Cas Mudde talked about “social populism”

to characterize parties whose “ideological stance echoesdemocratic socialism’s acceptance of parliamentary democ-racy and rejection of capitalism” (2005, p. 35). While doctrineprinciples and the “correct” class politics still define theseparties as radical left, the openness to egalitarianism and“proletarian” anti-elitism connects with populism, as well assupplementing class analysis with other identity issues,

4 Left-Wing Populism

including those associated with the right as ethnic or nationalsentiment. It is important to notice that the shift from radicalleft to populist left wing is, to some extent, a tendency pre-existing the crisis of 2008. Indeed, there is a continuity alongleft-wing populism before and after the crisis, even if it is truethat the crisis of representation and the popular movementsand social protests increased after 2008 and set the agendaand the priorities for left-wing parties. In short, even when theradical right-wing populism was dominant, the radical leftwas already embracing some populist principles. Withoutpretending to offer a comprehensive description of the popu-list moment (intensified in the aftermath of the crisis butexisting before), these elements are important to understand-ing the left-wing turn to populism. All of them are about thedecreasing capacity of representativeness by political parties.While the first two elements emphasize the production ofcommon interests between parties and other economicactors, leaving out the demands of the people, the third onepoints to a way of strengthening both participation andrepresentativeness.

• Party system crisis: The cartelization of political parties(Katz & Mair, 2018) provokes the disappearance ofdifferences between parties. Since they are funded by thestate, they reproduce the same pattern of behavior. Pol-iticians preserve their own interests, and that is whyparties collaborate among each other. The cartel partiesstop representing the demands of the electorate, andthe extra-parliamentary party organization loses rele-vance (Muller, 2000). Peter Mair warns that the defini-tion of democracy is leaving out its emphasis on popularsovereignty and the consequence of that would be “akind of democracy without the demos at its centre”(2013, p. 9).

Why Left-Wing Populism? 5

• Corruption: Cas Mudde in his definition of populismopposes the “pure people” against the “corrupt elite.” Theapplication of “pure” to “the people” is questionable, butthe characterization of “the elite” as “corrupt” requires amore detailed definition of what corruption is. The notionof “dependence corruption,” coined by Lawrence Lessig(2011), can be useful to such a definition. According to him,the main problem of the government is the dependency ofthe economic interests, its funders. Corruption is not aboutviolating the criminal laws but about the dependency thathighlights how political parties in government rule for theeconomic elites. Moreover, this reinforces the idea that thepattern of interaction underlying such a dependency isunbreakable and consequently avoidable. Corruption isrelational in the sense that it entails bad governance (thegovernment not expressing the will of the people) and losttrust (declining participation of the people due to their lackof faith in democratic processes).

• Political movements: It would be erroneous to considersocial revolts and protests, which increased enormously inresponse to the implementation of austerity politics, as arisk instead of a necessity, argues Jan Hoby (2013). Heclaims that what distinguishes both perceptions (movementsas risk or necessity) is the way in which social revolts arehandled politically in terms of organization, leadership,vision, and strategy. Incorporating the antiestablishmentrhetoric to articulate their discourses and experimental andhorizontal ways of organizing, some social movements havetransformed into political parties or, at least, movementsand parties are interrelated. As a consequence, some orga-nizational innovations are introduced such as the blurreddistinction between members and non-members, alternativefunding means, direct citizen engagement (social media and

6 Left-Wing Populism

digital tools), and mobilization of citizens (Klaukka, Vander Staak, & Valladares, 2017). The crisis of representationleaves the question of finding satisfactory means of partic-ipation and engagement open.

These three features show an overall picture of how the crisisof representation is fundamental to approaching the populistmoment and the reason why left-wing parties are embracingpopulismorpopulist strategies.However, themain issue at stakeis if populism is the main feature for the novelty responsescoming from the left and the right. In other words, is populismthe central political axis (“the people” vs “the elite,” the bottomvs the top) of the political dispute? If so, what happens with thetraditional left-right axis? Chantal Mouffe advocates for the“populist moment” as a conjuncture in which both the left andthe right adopt a populist strategy.Mouffe defines the “populistmoment” as “the expression of resistances against the post-democratic condition brought by 30 years of neoliberalhegemony” (2018, p. 79). The crisis of neoliberalism wouldallow fostering anewhegemonic formationwhich coulddevelopintomore democratic or authoritarian politics. The expectationsfrom a left-wing perspective are, obviously, to deepen democ-racy, but the association of “populism”with authoritarianism isfrequent in the public and academic debate. It is not surprisingthat the predominance of “populism” to elaborate a left projectbothers some leftist authors. They think that “populism” miti-gates the political importance of the left and moves it to anambivalent and less ideological place. Eric Fassin (2018a), forexample, criticizes that left-wing populism is replacing theideological conflict between left and rightwith one between “thepeople” and “the elite.” Fassin (2018b) does not see the point inreversing the “stigma” of populism or in labeling a politicalproject as left-wing populism, implying it has something incommon with right-wing populism; he refuses to accept that.

Why Left-Wing Populism? 7

I share Fassin’s concern about the political implications oferasing the left–right axis. There is, indeed, an intentionality inequating all types of populism regardless of their context orideology. The left–right conflict is replaced with the opposi-tion between liberalism (as democracy) and populism (asilliberalism) and produces paradoxically a political frontierseparating which options are democratic and which are not(Agustın & Briziarelli, 2018a). The distinction betweenliberalism and populism hides intentionally the importantdifferences between left- and right-wing populism and how the“populist moment,” using Mouffe’s concept, enables thegeneration of opposed political options. Judith Butler (2017)summarizes quite straightforwardly how pointless it is tocompare both kinds of populism: Right-wing populism canlead to fascism, while left-wing populism must lead to radicaldemocracy. Thus, left-wing populism must be seen, primarily,from the perspective of the left and, complementarily, fromthe way in which populism is embedded and contributes toredefining the practices of the left. There are elements, relatedto the populist tradition, such as participation or the inclusionof excluded groups, which are valuable in themselves for theleft. A similar exercise could be done with the far-right partiesor center-right parties who incorporate populist strategies orstyles as part of their political repertoires. As mentionedabove, my intention is to deepen what is characteristic of left-wing populism as a political phenomenon, specifically asdeveloped in the aftermath of the economic crisis in Europe.

DEFINING LEFT-WING POPULISM

One of the main reasons to keep the distinction betweenleft and right and not replace it completely with other dis-tinctions like “the people” vs “the elite” or populism vs

8 Left-Wing Populism