European populisms against post-politics: similarities and differences between Podemos and Movimento Cinque Stelle

One consequence of the Southern European crisis is the transformation of party systems and the emergence of new political actors uneasy to define along the left-right cleavage. This paper compares the rise of Podemos in Spain and Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy: to what extent do these political movements pertain to the same political logic? What does differentiate them and to what extent does this impact from a strategic point of view? In order to seize their common features, we rely on Ernesto Laclau’s definition of populism as a mode of construction of the political in terms of a chain of equivalences against a common enemy. Moreover, we argue that these political movements should be understood as a response to the attempt of emptying out politics of antagonisms through a 'restructuring' and 'rescaling' of political practice. We thereby follow the intuitions of thinkers such as Jacques Ranciere and Chantal Mouffe about the post-political character of contemporary societies, where a progressive replacement of political disagreement at the hand of technique has taken place. The emergence of these two political actors takes place in a moment of organic crisis, as Gramsci had it: a conjuncture characterised by a profound imbalance of the socio-political system, which leaves the door open for a disarticulation and re-articulation of social forces towards the establishment of a new equilibrium. In particular, we argue that, regardless of their ideological differences, they belong to a similar counter-hegemonic discourse which attempts to build a political frontier by re-injecting passions into the political arena, re-embedding the economy into the political sphere against the TINA claim and defining national and European elites as the enemy. However, despite sharing this common denominator, Podemos and M5S are quite different with regard to the normative and symbolic repertoires they deploy. While Podemos provides a wider definition of the enemy by alluding to both political and economic elites, M5S is mainly concerned with the political caste. Similarly, M5S refuses to inscribe its politics in any existing political tradition, whereas Podemos seems to constitute a distinctively post-Fordist re-elaboration of socialist thought. As a result of this, while both agents articulate various unsatisfied popular demands, M5S seems to follow a 'Peronist' path, by putting together elements often at odds with each other. In terms of perspectives then, the M5S may intuitively be better placed to enlarge its electoral consensus, but at disadvantage when thinking from the perspective of hegemony and the implementation of policies. The paper combines a theoretical discussion on populism with a qualitative analysis of the discourse of both political movements during the 2014 European election campaign. The similarities and differences in their discourse will be identified through a two-step methodology. First, it consists in identifying and comparing the general lexical patterns and themes in the speeches of each actor by using the lexicographic tools (occurrences, concordances, specificities). Then, the in-depth analysis of these patterns shall highlight the relations between the topics in each actor’s discourse, as well as the rhetorical forms supporting them.