Veridiction and Leadership in Transnational Populism: The Case of DiEM25

While research tends to explore questions of power and leadership at the national level, populism in Europe has moved beyond national borders, with an increasing number of transnational movements and organisations. This paper investigates the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) and its leadership(s)’s main speeches, focusing on power relations as these get reified in the movement’s official discourse. Informed by both discourse theory and Michel Foucault’s work on parrhesia (veridiction), the analysis draws on readings of transnational Euroalternativism and populism, power and leadership, and points to the conflicting logic of bringing together Euroalternativism and populism at the transnational level. Our findings thus stress the increasing politicisation of European integration as an opportunity to mobilise transnational activities, which are based on the populist ‘people vs. the elites’ dichotomy and against Brussels’ unaccountable elites (see FitzGibbon and Guerra, in press), while indicating the limits of leadership in a populist transnational movement (De Cleen, Moffitt, Panayotou, & Stavrakakis, 2019; Marzolini and Souvlis, 2016).