Nationalism and Populism on the Left: The Case of Podemos

This article provides a conceptual and empirical exploration of populism and nationalism within the left side of the political spectrum. A new academic debate has recently arisen around the conceptual distinction between nationalism and populism, mainly in response to the ways the two terms conflate in the scholarship on the radical Right. Following this new strand of academic debate, in our analysis we focus on leftist politics, which is often dismissed in empirical studies on the interaction between populism and nationalism. Podemos is a crucial case study for such an analysis, since not only it is a leftist political party that largely drawn upon populism to break successfully through the Spanish political system, but it has also made extensive use of nationalist elements in its discourse, as our data confirms. Building on a corpus that includes politicians’ speeches and primary data, such as interviews and original unpublished political party documents, our discourse analysis indicates that (a) nationalism is highly present in the discourse of Podemos; (b) it is part of the broader populist strategy of the party; and, most importantly, (c) it takes the form of counter-hegemonic nationalism, namely an attempt to shape an alternative form of national identification that challenges and opposes the dominant one on its own terrain. In the case of Podemos, this counter-hegemonic nationalism is constructed according to a configuration made out of three semantic fields: (1) welfare policies and solidarity; (2) history from below and people’s mobilization; and (3) cultural and national pluralism. Accordingly, the national pride that emerges in the discourse of Podemos refers to an inclusive welfare state, to people’s struggles, and to an idea of community that is not bonded by lingual, ethnic or national particularisms.