The State of Populism in Europe: Towards a Fourth Wave?

Abstract

Over the last decade, new populist parties have emerged across Europe. In parallel, pre-existing formations have made spectacular electoral breakthroughs. This unprecedented appeal of populism appears to have been mostly influenced by the effects of two large-scale crises, the Eurozone crisis and the European Refugee crisis. Although to different degrees, both Western and Eastern European party systems have been challenged by this new populist Zeitgeist. Accordingly, there is an ongoing yet contradictory scholarly debate on whether it is possible to speak of a fourth wave of populism, chronologically and programmatically distinct from the previous waves acknowledged by von Beyme (1988). Although the succession of waves cannot be easily defined in temporal terms, if we aim to investigate a new wave, it is necessary to identify the salient features of the phenomenon and, subsequently, the relevant cases taken into account. What are the specificities of the fourth wave of populism and which parties can be connected to this specific wave? As populism has often been associated with a 'sense' of crisis – whether objectively defined or subjectively perceived as such by the relevant political actors - we focus on the evolution of the phenomenon following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which symbolically opened the Great Recession. Given the extension and depth of contemporary populism, it is important to assess the new wave of populism and its main features by adopting a broad pan-European perspective including cases from Western as well as Eastern European countries, thus overcoming the conventional West-East divide. Within this context, this panel aims to provide space for debate and reflection both in relation to the demand and supply side. By putting together usual suspects from Western polities and cases from Eastern polities, this panel follows the exhortation made by one of the most acknowledgeable scholars in the field, Mudde (2016) aiming to assess the diversity within the far right party family in terms of scope, causes, and consequences. Pre-existing and new populist parties cannot be exclusively assessed as by-product of an objectively identifiable crisis (e.g. the European sovereign debt crisis; the European Refugee Crisis); on the contrary, populist parties can be seen as sources of a diffuse sense of crisis. This inverted causal relation has been chronicled in contexts only marginally affected by exogenous crises. Within this context, the panel aims to assess: How do new and pre-existing populist parties fill the 'empty vessels' constituted by 'the people' and the 'elites' in times of crisis? How do the different types of populist parties (e.g. neo-liberal populist, social populist, populist radical right) act as triggers for diffusing a sense of crisis? As such, the focus for the panel is on complementing the theoretical reflection on the populist politics stage with an empirical-oriented analysis dealing with the diversity of causes, issues, and consequences of the populist family in current European party politics.