Abstract
This article draws from primary research – including 46 semi-structured interviews – to provide a comparative analysis of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party between 2015 and 2020, and Nichi Vendola’s leadership of the Italian radical left between 2010 and 2015. It is claimed that both cases represent a new form of left politics – which we term pop-socialism – that combines popular-democratic appeals to the ‘people’ with the traditional class-based demands of democratic socialism. This contributes to recent literature on radical left politics and left populism by providing an insight into the underexplored relationship between popular-democratic and class politics. Moreover, the article provides an important empirical account of Corbyn and Vendola’s rapid mobilisation but also their equally abrupt decline.
Highlights
The 2010s were a tumultuous decade for the radical left in the Global North
We selected the two cases because preliminary observation had demonstrated that they comprised features which we considered typical of pop-socialism, but they emerged from different institutional contexts (Seawright and Gerring, 2008)
After the interviews were completed, we conducted a thematic analysis around three main themes: first, the combinations of populardemocratic and democratic socialist ideologies; second, the factors connecting the political leadership to grassroots activists; and the interactions between social movements and political parties in the anti-austerity era
Summary
The 2010s were a tumultuous decade for the radical left in the Global North. New leftist ‘outsider’ leaders emerged such as Nichi Vendola in Italy, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo Iglesias in Spain, Bernie Sanders in the United States, and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. Pop-socialism foregrounds appeals to the ‘people’ as part of a renewal of conventional socialist politics, rather than the replacement of it that some left populist scholars call for.
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