A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of radical left populism

There is a tendency in mainstream literature on populism to conflate various phenomena under the same label. Populism is often presented as the root of all evil, as a quintessentially pejorative term that is used to foreclose any challenge to the political mainstream. However. even an author who rejects the pejorative definitions of populism, such as Ernesto Laclau. incurred in this conflating problem. His formalistic approach was not always clear in differentiating between right-wing and left-wing, nor between authoritarian and democratic forms of populism. One of the merits of the volume edited by Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis is that it allows for an analysis of a particular expression of populism: the populist radical left in Europe The book's well-founded empirical studies indicate that radical left populism itself is not monolithic, as it assumes different shapes and dynamics in different countries. 

The different configurations point to different answers for two major tensions that traverse the populist radical left. The first tension is constitutive of what could be called "Populism 2.0" (Kioupkiolis, chapter 8). It refers to the innovative but also tense relation between political parties and autonomous protest movements that frequently lead to the creation of profound transformations. This tension is present in cases such as Syriza in Greece (Katsambekis, chapter 1) and Podemos in Spain (Kioupkiolis, chapter 2). To a large extent, their challenge is to find a compromise between their embedded horizontality (of the base) and their verticality (of a party). From the opposite angle, this challenge is also latent in leader-centred movements such as Jean-Luc Melenchon's France lnsoumise (Marliere, chapter 4), in which the bottom-up processes are inverted by a charismatic figure. 

The Levica party in Slovenia (Toplisek, chapter 3) also emerged from protest movements. but it may serve as a transition from the first tensions to a second kind: the tension between populist and socialist traditions within radical leh parties. Other borderline cases such as the Socialistische Partij in the Netherlands (Lucardie & Voerman, chapter 5), Die Linke in Germany (Hough & Keith, chapter 6) and even Corbyn(ism) in the UK (Maiguashca & Dean, chapter 7), show how left-wing politics interact with populist ones in inconsistent ways, often for strategic purposes, in various degrees and throughout the time. 

Because it makes these tensions explicit, this volume is especially useful in the context of a crisis. I am not only referring to the economic, social and health crisis that defines our world today, but also to the crisis of the populist radical left itself. Since the publication of the volume a few months ago, many things had happened to the populist radical left in Europe. If populism may be a by-product of crisis, and itself an element that brings crisis to the political arena, it now seems to face its own identity crisis. 

Despite its merits and the challenges of government, Syriza ended up losing the elections in July 2019. The experience in power undoubtedly transformed party and alienated part of its base. In January 2020, Podemos took part in a coalition government with their previous rivals from the centre-left PSOE. Paradoxically as it may seem, this was a bittersweet triumph, a concession after a series of deceiving electoral results and an internal split along populist and socialist lines. In France, Jean-Luc Melenchon portrayed himself as a victim of lawfare and instrumentalised political justice. The accusations against him jeopardized his movement, heavily depended on its leader's charisma. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn - a frontier case of populism - suffered a major defeat in the 2019 general election and was forced to step down from the Labour leadership. 

As Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis suggest in their introduction, their previous volume on the square movements (Radical democracy and collective movements today, 2014) indicated the potentialities and limits of the respective experiences. For them, the populist radical left appeared as a possible answer to these and other tensions. In the same vein, in his postscript Yannis Stavrakakis (chapter 9), suggests that the populist radical left was an answer to the crisis of the left. Following them, one can assume that the dislocation in populist radical left caused by the current crisis will be an impulse for its reinvention. 

Here, it is worth indicating a topic that is not well developed in the volume. Although the book discusses the populist radical left it says very little about these movements' relation with a very particular kind of radicality: the politics of radical democracy. It seems that, through institutionalisation and hierarchy, the populist radical left may have lost part of its transformative and disruptive power. Maybe, instead of fixing its own identity as a normal political player, the populist radical left - in Europe, but also abroad - should once again construct 'the people' as a destitutive symbol in a paradoxical counter-hegemonic hegemony.