Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Abstract

More than a decade has now passed since the “Eurozone crisis.” Few words were more used than “populism” and “austerity” during this period. The former was weaponized by mainstream political forces to downgrade anyone who strived to express popular demands contra to the will of the supposedly independent markets.1 Austerity, for its part, was presented as a tough yet the only available medicine to reestablish market confidence and secure the viability and health of the financial system. The health of the markets and the financial system, however, has proved incompatible with both the health of democratic institutions and—literally—the health of citizens across Europe. The market constituency became superior to the original democratic constituency, the people.2Austerity pushed a growing number of people into poverty, especially in the peripheral countries—Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus—whereas European banks have been rescued and recapitalized. There have been major cuts to wages and pensions, social benefits, the health-care system coupled with an assault on labor rights and a massive rise in unemployment.3 The loss of prosperity and various rights produced mass anti-austerity mobilizations. The Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi are perhaps the most popular cases but the Portuguese Geração à Rasca, or the Irish Occupy in Cork and Dublin and the Right2Water protests, or, finally, the Cypriot Alliance Against the Memorandum, are not insignificant. These were some of the largest mobilizations in the histories of these countries, indicating that austerity policies suffered from a lack of consensus and legitimacy.The populist character of these movements and mobilizations is to be found in their basic claim that “the people had been betrayed by the political elites, which were held responsible for the socio-economic collapse and the hollowing out of democratic institutions.”4 The populist radical-left anti-austerity wave that emerged at this juncture expressed the demand to break with the austerity policies and offer an alternative vision. Their radicalism is located precisely in their aim to fundamentally challenge the neoliberal status quo and fight for a democratic renewal in the EU.5 In this context there have been various voices that saw in left populism a chance for the “democratic refoundation of Europe.”6My aim in this article is to explore the lessons that can be learnt for left-wing populism from the last decade of crises. Drawing upon the “Essex School,” populism is understood here as a political logic marked by the discursive construction of a popular subjectivity, a “we, the people” and its antagonistic other, a “they, the establishment.”7 “The people” in this schema is always the contingent product of a process of linking together a set of unsatisfied demands expressed by diverse groups through a shared opposition. When this populist logic is coupled with a desire to get to the roots8 of the problems of the existing system and transform it, we are faced with a more or less radical articulation of populism.9My main focus will be the case of Syriza and one of the key questions here is whether populism was responsible for the debacle of the Syriza-led government in the summer of 2015. Does Syriza's defeat prove the limitations of left-wing populism at the national level in fighting against policies that have been orchestrated and coordinated at the EU level? My hypothesis is that Syriza reflects a structural limit that all left populist forces on the national level are destined to confront. The article also reflects on the possibilities of expanding populism from the national to the transnational level.Few would deny that European democracy reached a dark moment during the Eurozone crisis. The overall management of the crisis has indeed produced an ever more postdemocratic union. One can understand postdemocracy as a “democracy after the demos,”10 a situation where “politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.”11 The European Union has always been marked by a governance without government, a lack of genuine European-level contestation over policy agendas and over executive office as well as a lack of real accountability.12During the epoch of the Troika, austerity, and the memoranda, all political energy was devoted to rescuing the banks, often at the expense of people's living standards, while democratic procedures have been repeatedly sidelined. Instead of the people, decisions have been taken as closely as possible to the markets.13 My argumentation here is twofold: on one level, the crisis opened the window for the introduction of a set of mechanisms and reforms to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), such as the Fiscal Compact and the European Semester.14 More sovereign decision-making powers have been handed to unelected bodies of the EU such as the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Stability Mechanism (ESM)/European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and the European Commission while new disciplinary and rescue mechanisms have been created. These measures have further reduced “the scope for national discretion over spending decisions regardless of electoral preferences.”15 On the second level, the operations of the Troika, that is the European Commission, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) responsible for the engineering, administration and monitoring of the aid packages, in the Programme Countries, namely Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, and Spain, have been marked by a lack of transparency, to put it mildly.16 In the Programme Countries, then, a more authoritarian version of postdemocracy has developed whereas at the same time the whole Eurozone has undergone a process of strengthening and further institutionalizing postdemocracy.17What we have witnessed was a process of stripping away at democracy, a process that involved the disappearance of its basic component, “the people,” “both as an instance of symbolic legitimation and as an instance of real control.”18 It is precisely at this point that populism emerged with the aim to discursively construct a people in opposition to the power bloc—a technocratic postpolitical authority.19 Populism, in this sense, has been a response to the postdemocratic predicament and the subsequent legitimation crisis. It aspired to establish a rupture with the austerity consensus by demanding a recovery and expansion of democracy. Prodemocratic movements, such as the Indignados and Aganaktismenoi, under the slogans “they do not represent us,” “we, the people,” and “real democracy now!,” demanded the transfer of power from elites to the people.20 A left-wing, anti-austerity, populist wave was born in the wake of the economic and political crises.21 Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, both of which had strong presence in the aforementioned movements, with Podemos spawned from the Indignados, have been considered the most paradigmatic cases of left-wing populism emerging from this wave.22At this point a critical question needs to be raised: where does the power to resist austerity reside? And the answer that was given was the nation-state. Indeed, Cristina Flesher Fominaya indicates that the return of the nation-state as the main locus of mobilization is what characterizes the anti-austerity wave and what distinguishes it from previous ones, such as the Global Justice Movement.23 Given, for example, the supranational character of the Troika, this might be surprising especially in the domain of social movements. There have been exceptions, such as the Alter Summit and Blockupy, but in general, the popular dissent against austerity was expressed with the return of the nation as the principal arena of struggle.24 In the institutional realm, this appears more reasonable because representation on the transnational level does not really exist.25Syriza's electoral triumph in Greece in January 2015 represents the peak of this wave, at least in its institutional/electoral form, as it became the first populist radical-left party in government in Europe. This gave rise to the belief that positive developments for left populist parties in Europe and in particular for Podemos in Spain and Sinn Féin in Ireland were on the way. Both of these countries were about to hold elections in the upcoming year, in December 2015 and February 2016, respectively. A European “pink tide”—à la Latin America of the 2000s when left populist governments were united under a shared anti-neoliberal agenda—was in the making. The success of such a project, though, depended largely on the outcome of Syriza's endeavor.Populism was without a doubt a defining characteristic of Syriza's discourse when in opposition and it continued occupying center stage after winning the elections.26 Syriza formed a government with Anel (Independent Greeks), a right-wing anti-austerity party with strong nationalist and arguably populist elements. Apart from the fact that this coalition proved the strength of the pro- versus anti-austerity cleavage in that particular context, we also see that for Syriza this was an opportunity to expand its social base beyond their traditional left supporters. Populism was instrumental at this point. Although the discursive approach sees the equivalential logic of populism operating at the societal/grassroots level, one could apply it here to the coalition-building process at the level of political parties.27Now, one could argue that being in government and populist at the same time constitutes a paradox because coming to power makes a populist force part of “the establishment.” Yet things are more complicated, and we should note that being in government is not necessarily synonymous with being in power. A political party in government, therefore, can still utilize a populist antagonistic logic to form its discourse. This was played out in the case of Syriza with ministers reporting that their administration was being held hostage by domestic and European politico-economic elites.28 The first six months of Syriza's tenure were marked by a confrontation between a populist form of politics aiming to represent the voice of the people, and a more institutionalist form of politics bound to protect the rules of the political game and ensure that business will continue as usual.29The continuing deadlock in the negotiations was designed to exhaust and destabilize the Syriza-led government.30 The solution to the impasse came in June 2015 when the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras announced a snap referendum on the creditors’ demands, intending to put “an end to the blackmail.”31 A campaign of terrorization of the Greek people was put in place. The ECB stopped access to the Emergency Liquidity Assistance, leading to the shutdown of the banks and the imposition of capital controls.32 The president of the Commission urged the Greek people to support the new austerity package by stressing that “you mustn't commit suicide because you are afraid of death . . . You must vote yes, independently of the question asked.”33 Mainstream public discourse in Greece, from the media to former prime ministers and even pop stars, were all pushing for a Yes vote interpreting the question as a Yes or No to Grexit.34 Syriza, for its part, insisted that the referendum concerned the terms of the Troika's ultimatum and a No vote would strengthen the negotiating position of the Greek government.35On the 5 July 2015, the Oxi (No) camp won with a resounding 61.31 percent. This No could be construed as a denial of the postdemocratic austerity consensus in the EU, without, however, “any positive indication of the way forward.”36 In other words, the Greek citizens did not know with any certainty where this No could lead them, but they knew precisely and unambiguously after five years of brutal austerity what a Yes vote would entail.However, the No meant little to the EU. After a Euro Summit on 12 July, Greece was threatened with exit from the Eurozone and forced to accept a harsher bailout agreement.37 The rationale of this outcome can be summarized in the words of Slovakia's Finance Minister, Peter Kažimir: “tough for Athens because . . . of their ‘Greek Spring.’”38 Some commented that “the dark forces of the EU have subjected Greece to a coup.”39 The hashtag #ThisIsACoup was the second top trending topic worldwide and top in Greece and Germany.40 For the Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, however, rather than being a coup this was “a typical European arrangement.” The third bailout agreement included the signature of Syriza, forcing it to implement the failed austerity policies that it had been opposing for years. Neither the radical left party nor its leader took ownership of this bailout package.41For Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's finance minister until the night of the July referendum, what followed was a “curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people.”42 It is ironic that Syriza's rise was mostly due to its struggle to put “the people” on the stage again and during its first term in office there was indeed a strong desire of “the people” to participate and support its government on the streets. Put differently, “the people” that Syriza called upon aspired to control its historicity, understood in Alain Touraine's terms as society's capacity for self-production, that is to “act upon themselves and produce their future.”43 With the capitulation of Syriza, “the people” were left again with a hopeless and melancholic impression that they cannot contest the course of historicity.Some argue that this traumatic experience confirms the deterministic arguments that populism always fails when in government as “its own inability to live up to its promises” is revealed.44 Indeed, some scholars responded to the capitulation of Syriza by sounding the death knell of left-wing populism.45 For instance, Cas Mudde described Syriza's debacle as “the failure of the populist promise.”46 The formal approach to populism, however, allows us to escape reductionist views that attach this phenomenon to specific outcomes or make it synonymous with demagogy and overpromising. Populism from this point of view is defined as a discursive logic that links different demands and identities into a common chain producing a popular subject, “the people,” antagonistically to an elite. One could follow Giorgos Venizelos and Yannis Stavrakakis in wondering whether it was populism responsible for Syriza's devastating outcome. As they maintain, “Syriza's failure is not rooted in its populism.”47 In fact, populism in this case flourished, because Syriza proves, on the one hand, that populism at the national level is capable of creating a chain of equivalence between diverse struggles that can lead to electoral victories. On the other hand, these victories at the national level are not enough, because the decision-making process takes place elsewhere. As such, Syriza reflects a structural limit that all left-wing populist forces in the EU countries inevitably face. Hence, to return to Mudde's blunt aphorism, it may be more accurate to characterize this defeat not as the failure of the populist promise per se, but “the failure to have a successful (progressive) populism in government, in one country.”48A circle was closed for left populism in the summer of 2015. Syriza's U-turn had a negative impact on Podemos and Sinn Féin, which had to readjust and moderate their strategy and program.49 The European “pink tide” crashed before it was even born. The defeat of Syriza reveals the limits of national politics. The dispersion of power from the national level to the supranational and intergovernmental institutions of the EU and its subsequent divorce from politics that remained tethered to the national and local levels became yet again evident.50 The hope that their remarriage can take place in one state faded. Nevertheless, there was a small but not insignificant victory of Syriza, which consists precisely in the fact that it unmasked the postdemocratic face of the EU and the ruthlessness of the authoritarian turn in the Troika countries. In so doing, it contributed to the politicization of the EU and the Europeanization of problems related to debt, banks, and poverty, which have mostly been considered national issues.Perhaps one of the most crucial lessons that this case teaches us is that under neoliberal globalization, issues of democracy, sovereignty, and mobilization have been posed anew and problems related to them—but also to debt, poverty, migration, and the environment, among others—are not national problems anymore. They are transnational ones, and thus potential solutions to them cannot be found within the narrow confines of the nation-state. This brings forward a strong normative hypothesis that those who believe in the radical democratic potential of left populism have to start thinking of this phenomenon in transnational terms.Transnational populism may sound like contradictio in terminis, in particular for those who maintain that populist politics cannot take place outside the nation-state.51 After all, it is true that the populist construction of “the people” usually takes place within a national context simply because we still live, banally speaking, in a world of nations. However, I argue that the Essex School of Discourse Analysis offers the safest path for making the idea of transnational populism thinkable.52 This is due to the detachment from particular site-specific, ideological or any other content. Put differently, there is no predetermined essence, ideas or elements that accompany “the people,” which is the always contingent outcome of bringing together heterogeneous demands and groups into a common chain.53 This can take many different routes at many different levels: from national to local and various regional levels.To better grasp the specificity of transnational populism, it is important to distinguish it from two other possible forms of populism beyond the national level, namely the international and the postnational. To begin with, the international form entails a flexible collaboration between national peoples, parties and/or movements.54 A postnational articulation of populism would strive to construct a homogeneous postnational identity that would negate the heterogeneity of national identities. It would focus on going beyond the level of the nation-state. A transnational populism, in my view, brings those two moments together; it means between, but also beyond, the nation-states, involving the construction of a popular identity that, although it moves beyond the national borders, does not aim to replace national identities but rather to supplement them.55 Whereas both inter- and postnational populisms assume a single common identity—national in one case, postnational in the other—a transnational populism entails “a people” that is perceived as a plural subject.Although empirical examples of a postnational populism are yet to emerge, cases of international and transnational populism do exist. One significant example is the “Plan B” initiative of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Plan B is directly linked to Syriza's debacle. It was formed as a response to what happened after the July referendum.56 With an emphasis on an international cooperation against the elites across Europe, the ECB and the “authoritarian Eurogroup,” Plan B aspired to “break with this ‘Europe.’”57 That gradually gave its place to a more aggressive stance against the EU, with many actors involved in this initiative adopting the position of exiting the EU and going back to the nation-state.58 As Oscar García Agustín observes, “Plan B prioritizes the national arena and it is structured around it.”59 As such, Plan B's international populism stays in a loose cooperation between national populisms representing national peoples, which ultimately results in a reproduction of national politics without the determination to move beyond this context.Now DiEM25, another by-product of the dislocatory moment of Syriza's capitulation, is a paradigmatic case of transnational populism.60 This pan-European movement was launched by the ex-Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the Croatian author and political activist Srećko Horvat in February 2016. DiEM prioritizes the move from the national to the transnational level as the main arena of struggle. This prioritization was mostly informed by the failure of national endeavors to have any real impact. The aim of DiEM has been to expand the populist spirit of the anti-austerity wave to the European level by forming a transnational, pan-European movement. Indeed, the demand to “put the demos back to democracy against the European Union establishment that sees people power as a threat to its authority” along with the demand for an EU that works “for the people not against the people” reveal the populist character of DiEM.61 In a slightly more formal way, DiEM25’s discourse is structured upon the populist logic drawing an antagonistic frontier between two opposing agencies: “we, the people” and “they, the establishment.” The idea put forward is that there is an urgent need to go beyond the fetishism of national boundaries to envisage an alternative and thus DiEM attempts to construct a transnational people in the name of democracy against what they describe as “Europe's deep establishment.”62The transnational people that DiEM attempts to construct is comprised of Europe's working and middle classes, “the many,” all those who suffer from austerity, the “less powerful” and “every genuine democrat.”63 At the other end of the spectrum, the elites that DiEM opposes include the “one percent,” a network of actors and institutions both national and transnational whose logic is the perpetuation of the status quo, national and transnational elites, the oligarchies without frontiers.64 It is crucial to note that DiEM proposes a transnational fight against both national and transnational elites.The final element of DiEM25’s discourse that merits consideration in this article is the idea of a plural sovereignty that this pan-European movement seeks to promote. References to popular democratic sovereignty and even to national sovereignty are often employed, but for DiEM25 the latter “can only be achieved through struggles that are forging the European demos.”65 Sovereignty at the European level with “a sovereign European people” is presented as the condition for the restoration of sovereignty at the national level.66 A plural conception of sovereignty is adopted because “the old-fashioned Westphalian notion of sovereignty and citizenship . . . is no longer consistent with a democratic EU.”67 As Horvat highlights, DiEM25 “cannot retreat to the illusion that something such as national sovereignty still exists today.”68 That is why sovereignty is linked with the creation of a European people and it acquires an additional pan-European dimension.What has taken place in the crisis-ridden EU is, on the one hand, a further institutionalization of postdemocracy with the empowerment of the executive organs conjoined with the disempowerment of national parliaments as well as with the Europeanization of the budgetary policies following the European Semester and the Fiscal Compact. On the other hand, the Troika's intervention in the Programme Countries signified a more authoritarian turn with an unprecedented and asymmetric concession of sovereignty. It is this context of severe economic and political crises that brought populism back on the agenda. The radical left populist anti-austerity wave, from the various movements and mobilizations to the electoral scene, played an important role in transforming the general frustration produced by the policies of extreme austerity and the dissatisfaction with formal politics due to the way that the crisis was managed into demands. Responding to the hollowing out of the people, left-wing populism entered the scene by discursively constructing a people and demanding to put the demos back into democracy.The failure of Syriza forces us to consider the limits of populism, or more precisely, of populism on the national level. The construction of “a people” at the national level is not enough to fight against policies that have been orchestrated and coordinated at the EU level. The main point here is that “when you have an adversary, you need to try to measure up to it”69 and hence if the adversary is the dominant neoliberal forces, one needs to act on the transnational level, because these are transnational forces. This might mean that we need new forms of radical politics that prioritize the transnational level, not only to get to the roots of the problem but also to adequately tackle them and produce real change.Transnational populism can be regarded as a possibility here. In this path, I have reflected on the specificity of transnational populism, arguing that a transnational people does not entail a single, postnational “we” that would erase national identities. It would rather coexist with diverse national particularities leading to a plural conception of shared identities.70 This is evident in the discourse of DiEM25 that is articulated around the populist antagonistic schema, building a common identity that, although going beyond national boundaries, does not aim to replace national identities.DiEM25 offers a key case for studying the phenomenon of transnational populism, its potential and its limitations. The fact that forces like DiEM have to operate within a world where the nation-state is still prevalent makes the construction of a transnational people a challenging task. This along with its internal contractions and tensions might explain DiEM's electoral nonsuccess in the 2019 European Parliament elections, a theme that falls beyond the scope of this article. On a more positive note, such formations can contribute to the emergence of an agonistic transnational public sphere where political actors develop their contrasting visions for Europe as well as to the expansion of democratic politics on the EU level.71 Although DiEM might not be able to achieve much, the future of Europe and the fight for a more democratic EU lies in this kind of transnational populist mobilizations.