Exploring Competing Narratives of the Emergence of Populism: The Case of Greece

There has been a recent surge of interest on various aspects of populist politics. In this rich body of literature, one can find, two distinct perspectives on the origins and nature populism. The first is what we will call ‘the illiberal thesis’, put forward by Takis Pappas, which sees populism as a democratic, but illiberal form of politics. The second perspective, advocated by Yannis Stavrakakis, amongst others, suggests that populism, at least in its left wing rendition, can be seen as a potentially ‘inclusionary’ form of politics seeking to resist ‘zombie capitalism’ and to reinvigorate a currently unrepresentative, stale democracy. Taken together these two approaches offer us very different templates for conceptualising populism as well as for mapping its origins. The aim of this paper is to explore the insights of these two competing narratives concerning the conditions that give rise to populism, in general, and the dominance of populist politics in Greece since the eruption of the Eurozone crisis, in particular. More specifically, the paper will compare and contrast these two perspectives according to three levels of analysis - the macro, meso and micro factors - examining where the weight of causality is placed in each narrative and which empirical processes/factors are assigned to each level. What we shall argue in the paper is that, despite offering ostensibly very different conceptions of populism, both approaches share the same weaknesses. More concretely we suggest that their accounts of the origins of populism would be more convincing if more conceptual and empirical attention was given to the role of global political economic forces at the macro level, on the one hand, and to the constitution and nature of the ‘people’ at the micro level, on the other.