This paper examines and compares the political discourses of right-wing and leftwing allegedly populist parties when addressing Europeanization issues. The main goal is to substantiate empirically the distinction between left-wing and right-wing populism regarding this discursive dimension.
As many researchers point out, the last three decades have been times of disturbance for the stability of the two-party system in Europe. New parties – environmental focused, far right-wing or left-wing, niche parties - emerged challenging the usual political discourses and the distribution of electoral opportunities (Meguid, 2005: 347; Dahlström and Sundell, 2012: 353-354). Some of the scholars who have turned their attention to this phenomenon use the label “populism” to name a specific type within these challenging political parties (Hartleb, 2012; Giusto, Kitching & Rizzo, 2013; Malone, 2014). There are empirical evidences about the emergence of traditional right-wing populist parties in Western Europe (Albertazzi and Mc Donnel, 2007; Hartleb, 2012) and new left-wing populist parties (Rovira Kaltwasser and Mudde, 2011; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014), but there are still outstanding questions for further exploration: What do these new leftwing populist parties propose and make regarding Europe and Europeanization issues in contrast to the traditional right-wing populist parties? And what are the set of explanatory factors triggering the emergence of such – hypothetically - distinct political proposals and strategies? The extent to which these political parties may challenge the current European Union and its institutional configuration is only assessable on the basis of a rigorous analysis of their actual positions, strategies and discourses on Europeanization issues.
The core argument of this work poses that right-wing populism and left-wing populism express discursively distinct strategic responses to the Euro-crisis – along with other structural factors - and the specific domestic electoral market; consequently, the two subtypes of populism show significant differences when framing Europeanization issues.
This paper is based on a holistic theoretical framework which integrates structural factors – economic, political and normative contexts – and agential factors – party goals, power distribution and ideologies – explaining the variability of the discourses. Through a cross national analysis of two cases embedded in their respective national contexts – a right-wing party: Alternative für Deutschland and a left–wing party: Podemos – the aim is to obtain empirical evidences to substantiate the distinct strategic responses of these parties.
Quantitative content analysis and qualitative causal analysis are combined in order to integrate the comparison of the formal composition of the discourses – salience and direction - and the social forces behind the constitution of such discourses.
