Changing Socioeconomic Policies in Southern Europe: the Role of Anti-Neoliberal Populist Parties in Power

In the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crises, Southern European party systems were shaken by the rise of new or, until then, only marginal challenger parties from the left, which combined a strong critique of ‘mainstream’ political parties with an anti-neoliberal, anti-austerity stance. Between 2015 and today, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Left Bloc in Portugal have either been in office or granted parliamentary support to socialist-led minority governments. In three out of four of them, with the Left Bloc being added as a deviant case, these parties presented distinct populist features in terms of people-centrism and anti-elitism. The aim of the present paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the socioeconomic policies proposed, and in some cases adopted, by the four parties under consideration. The focus of the empirical analysis is placed on which specific policy mixes were promoted by these parties in terms of welfare, redistribution and market regulation, and what was the relative salience of such policies within their programmatic platforms (before the elections) and then as relevant policy actors (once in power). To answer these questions, the paper will rely on a qualitative content analysis of party manifestos, leaders’ speeches and mass media material, to investigate the pre-electoral discourse, and of legislative texts, policy documents and secondary literature to provide a comparative understanding of the actual socioeconomic reforms adopted when these parties were in parliament or in office. The timespan considered in the article covers the years 2015-2019 for Syriza (main coalition partner in government), 2018-today for Podemos (parliamentary support between June 2018 and January 2020, junior coalition partner since then), 2018-today for the Five Star Movement (main coalition partner in government, within different coalitions), 2015-2019 for the Left Bloc (parliamentary support). The article offers two main contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, it sheds light on the differential policy priorities among the four parties and how their policy objectives changed before and after coming to power. This furthers our understanding of the challenger parties emerged in Southern Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which presented themselves as alternatives to ‘mainstream’ centre-left parties. Secondly, it integrates a broader reflection on the consequences of populism in power, in particular the role of the under-researched left-leaning populist actors as policy-makers and whether and to what extent they differ from each other as well as from non-populist actors once they reach influential policy positions.