Abstract
The paper re-assesses the relation between the economic crisis and the rise of populist parties in the South of Europe. It argues that the former did not cause the latter directly, but rather played out as a catalyst of previously existing trends, i.e. the erosion of party democracy and the disintermediation of Western societies. It combines several theoretical approaches to advance an explanatory model that replaces the relation between crisis and populism – conceived of as political, performative and discursively mediated – within its structural pre-conditions. By doing so, it aims at providing a synthetic and steady explanation of the contemporary rise of populism in Southern Europe and beyond.
Highlights
Despite the relative predominance of the ideational perspective – populism as a thin-centred ideology – both concepts of populism and crisis still lack a fully stable, consensual definition within academe
Many of the contemporary approaches – including the Essex school (Howarth & Torfing 2005; Howarth, Norval & Stavrakakis 2000; Stavrakakis 1999), the stylistic approach (Jagers & Walgrave 2007; Moffitt & Tormey 2014; de Vreese & al. 2018) and part of the ideational branch (Mudde 2004; Hawkins & al. 2018; Ibsen 2019) – assume at least some sort of relation between crisis and populism, variable in strength and scope. This view has been further enhanced by the concomitance between the aftershocks of the 2008 economic crisis and the upsurge of new populist movements, somehow reminiscent of the connection regularly established between the Great Depression and the rise of fascism
While Moffitt’s sophisticated theorization has solved the crucial issue of non-automatic but unavoidable correlation between crisis and populism (Moffitt 2015), it leaves pending the puzzling issue of whether populism should be conceived as a “hype” or as a “paradigm”
Summary
Despite the relative predominance of the ideational perspective – populism as a thin-centred ideology – both concepts of populism and crisis still lack a fully stable, consensual definition within academe. In Southern Europe – due to the harsher nature of the recession, the reaction of traditional elites, and the position of those countries within the structure of the Euro area – burgeoning populist movements were able to frame the management of the economic crisis as the oligarchic takeover of democracy.
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