Is the populist moment over for the left?

From Populism Newsletter #2, July 2020, pp. 4-5.

Giorgos Venizelos,

PhD candidate, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence

Yannis Stavrakakis,

Professor, School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University Thessaloniki

Following Syriza’s capitulation and its July 2019 electoral defeat in Greece, Podemos’s compromises in Spain, then the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in December 2019 and, finally, Bernie Sanders’ second failure to secure the Democratic nomination, scepticism seems to be spreading within left-wing circles as to the viability of populism as a political strategy for the left. This scepticism is often accompanied by the argument that the populist moment for the left is now over.

Without ignoring populism’s limitations, we would like to scrutinise the claim that it has completely failed as a strategy. Declarations of such end points often betray a linear and determinist logic — and thus seem to ignore the fluidity and contingency of the political and the continually reactivated cycles of political antagonism. Consider, for example, Argentina, where the populist left returned to power in 2019 after a four-year break — or Latin America more broadly, a continent that seems to be experiencing another ‘populist moment’. We would argue that these cycles of decline and reactivation are embedded in the political struggle itself — and thus demand a more open-ended perspective.

Much of the reductionism entailed in the proposition that left populist projects necessarily fail in the institutions or in society is very much rooted in the uncritical and pejoratively conditioned use of the term ‘populism’. We define populism as a collective identification that is organised around the empty signifier ‘the people’ and is constructed in opposition to an ‘elite’. The constitution of identity as transversal requires the mobilisation of passions too. Consequently, for ‘the people’ to function as a universal identity, the political task of extending politics beyond narrow class interests and translating it into a project relevant at the national-popular plane is required. Additionally, in left populism, left politics do not necessarily come second. They are rather framed as a ‘common sense’ and are articulated as ‘the politics of the people’. With such an understanding of (left) populism, ‘failure’ should be understood as the inability to maintain an affective popular hegemony, either political or cultural, inside and outside the institutions, that cross-cuts different sections of society. Whether a left populist agent fails to implement economic and political transformations that are canonically ascribed to a ‘leftist narrative’, this should be understood as a failure of the left component of the populist project and not necessarily of its populist strategy. Analytically at least, the two components seem distinct.

No doubt, populism is not a panacea. Empirical examples indicate a number of limitations they may face. For example, even when a populist strategy proves to be electorally victorious, a deep and lengthy — obviously not, in any sense, eternal — hegemony would require additional tools and resources. This would include some sort of technical expertise and creative spirit regarding institutional design, combined with a firm (not to be confused with idealistic) democratic ethos. Perhaps the most common danger any populist force faces, is the co-optation of its democratic radicalism. This happens if it succumbs to established (elitist) values and the pre-existing post-democratic institutions of a society — to ‘business as usual’. Even in cases where left populist projects (e.g. in Latin America) manage to bring about redistribution of wealth, and lower the degree of poverty and marginalisation, they may still fail to impact considerably on the mode of production or even the psychosocial framing of consumption, which conditions the majority of social identities.

Did left populism face major limitations in its most recent attempt to claim power? Is left populism currently on the decline? The answers are undeniably affirmative. Most of the limitations with respect to the implementation of the ‘populist program’ however, seem to follow from the difficulties that emerge in government and in institutional politics. They seem to be exogenous and not endogenous to populism. To be sure, it is not easy to combine populist priorities with a governmental rationale. Some populists were confronted with their inability to break with a pre-existing political culture or socioeconomic frame or to handle anti-populist attacks in a way that protected or extended popular empowerment.

These issues, however, do not seem to be inherent to populist strategy itself. Such over-determination and co-optation by outside forces can affect more or less all political movements when they come up against similar challenges within particular historical contexts. In fact, they may point to a broader limitation affecting left-wing commitments in the twenty-first century and the difficult passage to post-capitalist alternatives. This was perhaps the case with Syriza. But taking a look on the Right of the spectrum confirms this hypothesis too. Despite the political blackmail that Lega’s Salvini recently posed against the EU, not only did he not succeed, but eventually – due to his own strategic mistakes of course - he got ‘thrown out’ of government.

Finally, and keeping an ethos of contingency at the forefront, one needs to remember that history is not static. Just as the left populist moment of the early 2010s emerged ‘out of nothing’, so to speak, it can also re-emerge unexpectedly. Similarly, the populist Right which is currently surging can be understood as a renewed wave of the populist right we observed in the 1980s. Political antagonism is inherently unpredictable and, besides, can one point to an alternative class-based strategy on the left, able to replace left populism as a hegemonic strategy? Perhaps, what should be discussed more widely are the ways in which a victorious left-wing populist agent can effectively implement a left-wing project in the present conjuncture, because even a winning populist strategy is never enough.