The rise of populist challengers from the Left: implications for welfare politics in crisis-ridden Southern Europe

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 that combined a strong critique of the political establishment with marked anti-neoliberal and anti-austerity positions. Despite differences in their ideological underpinnings and electoral trajectories, all parties had initially presented themselves as alternatives to the mainstream Left and adopted, to a varying degree, populist discourse and mobilization strategies. Between 2015 and 2018, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy and the Left Bloc in Portugal had either entered office or started granting parliamentary support to socialist-led minority governments. By taking stock of the parties’ policy-making experiences in governments and parliaments, the paper provides a comparative assessment of their policy stances in the realm of welfare before and after they reached power. Methodologically, it relies on quantitative and qualitative analyses of electoral manifestos and programmatic statements retrieved from the parties’ official websites (policy documents, interviews, press releases), taking into account the timespan from the onset of the financial crisis (for Syriza and the Left Bloc) or the parties’ creation (for the Five Star Movement and Podemos) throughout their policy-making experience, i.e. as governmental partners or parliamentary allies to the ruling party. The analysis considers both proposed and adopted policies and explores which sub-policy areas are prioritized by the four parties in the welfare realm, which social risks are addressed and which main beneficiaries are targeted. The aim of the paper is to investigate how welfare policy is shaped by populist challenger parties from the Left once they reach relevant policy-making positions, how their policy agenda evolves as they progressively institutionalize and in what ways populism influences the content of their policy proposals. The intended contribution is two-fold: firstly, the paper complements the research currently being developed on the socioeconomic stances of right-wing challenger and populist parties, by focusing on their counterparts on the left; secondly, it examines ‘new left’ parties emerged in a context of deep economic and political crisis and their social policy stances from a programmatic perspective, namely the ‘supply side’ of policy-making, shedding light on a potentially renewed partisan dimension of welfare politics and the role of populism in shaping social policy.