The aim of this paper is to analyze and compare the birth and the development of two recently-born political movements, the Five Star Movement in Italy and Podemos in Spain. The main questions that this paper will answer are: to what extent these movements may be labeled as populist? And if so, do they represent the same “type” of populism? In this paper I argue that, although both share a common anti-establishment framework and the criticism toward the globalization, those movements show some ideological differences: while the Five Star Movement resembles a sort of populist party’s ideal-type, Podemos ideology is marked by left-wing political discourse.
Albeit in the aftermath of the election the two movements adhere to opposite European families, the Five Star Movement and Podemos focused their target on getting rid of the political élite, in the national context and in the European one. For that reason, both were accused to be part of the new European populist wave, along with other parties in Europe in particular right-right parties.
The first part is devoted to a brief introduction on the definition of populism within the European context: populism will be regarded as a thin-centred ideology whose core is represented by anti-elite(s) and anti-status quo attitudes. From a methodological standpoint, the concept analysis as explained by Sartori is the starting point for the analysis of populism.
The core of the analysis is divided in three parts. Following the methodological interpretation of party’s formation proposed by Panebianco in 1988, the first part will focus on the structure of two movements in the years of their institutionalization in order to grasp the organizational imprinting that both impressed to the organization. Secondly, the analysis explores the political manifestos of both movements in the recent rallies, looking at the alleged populist ideology and how both movement “framed” the economic crisis in Europe, in particular the causes and the possible remedies that both propose. Thirdly, since part of the literature on populist parties consider the role of the leadership an essential feature of any populist movement, a comparison with four discourses held by the two leaders of the movements, Iglesias and Grillo, will be analyzed in order to test the consistency of the programs with political positions proposed to a wider public and the importance of the anti-élite stance vis-à-vis other issues.
The last two parts will be operationalized through both standard methodology of the content analysis and through non-standard tools (critical discourse analysis).
