Left-wing populisms in power: a policy appraisal from Southern Europe

In the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crises, Southern European party systems were shaken by the striking electoral success of challenger parties which combined left-leaning or utterly leftist ideological traits with marked populist elements. Even though the emergence of left-wing variants of populism has characterized several European countries throughout the continent, it is only in the Mediterranean region that they were able to acquire influential policy positions both in parliaments and in the executive. Syriza was main coalition partner in the Greek government from 2015 to 2019. In Spain, Podemos entered office as junior coalition member in January 2020 after having granted parliamentary support to a centre-left minority government for a year and a half. The Five Star Movement has been main coalition partner in Italy for two consecutive governments, albeit with different allies, since May 2018. Despite differences in the electoral trajectories and in their ideological-organizational features, all three parties present a clear populist rhetoric whereby the ‘people’ and its antagonistic fight against the ‘other’, i.e. the ‘elites’, are articulated in socioeconomic terms (rather than sociocultural or identitarian ones), and they arguably owe much of their electoral success to their anti-neoliberal, anti-austerity platforms. Taking stock of the relevant policy-making positions they acquired, the paper provides a cross-case and diachronic analysis of the policies promoted and adopted by the three parties once in power, with a focus on the socioeconomic realm (mainly the areas of welfare, work, fiscal policy). By combining qualitative in-depth analysis of party manifestos, leaders’ speeches and policy documents with interviews with party members and parties’ policy advisors, I aim at identifying the main elements that characterized the policy content of the reforms pursued in the policy domains where the three parties had been more vocal, by investigating in particular which policy areas they specifically addressed, what was their relative salience and how the policy issues were framed. The main objective of this exploratory case study research is to shed light not only on the values, ideas and principles that underlay the policy proposals of left-leaning populist parties in power, but also their evolution in the transition from being parties in the opposition to actors within the institutions, and the obstacles they encountered in realizing their policy platforms. So devised, the present paper aims at furthering our understanding of the nature of some of the most successful political projects in Southern Europe in recent years, by combining the perspective of populist studies with the analysis of policy contents and policy processes.