A void in three colours: the populist dilemmas in Southern Europe

In the 2010s, several ‘inclusionary’ populist forces have made considerable breakthroughs across South European party systems. A few years after their irruption, however, these movements have followed a strikingly similar trajectory, marked by several setbacks in the form of disappointing exercise of executive power, electoral stagnation or decline, and/or harsh internal tensions leading to party splits. While there has been a considerable amount of research on these new parties that focuses on the context of their emergence and their organisation and/or discourse, singly or comparatively, we still lack a comprehensive, comparative and diachronic account of their trajectory from the onset to this day that goes beyond the well-known paradox of institutionalization (according to which anti-establishment parties are bound to lose part of their externality to the system they criticize) and investigates the obstacles that are specific to left populist forces evolving in the South European socio-political context of the 2010s. The paper aims to fill this gap by looking at how the macro context that has enabled left populism to irrupt onto the political scene has also determined its evolution over the course of the decade. This context is marked by the partial erosion of party democracy’s institutions and actors (mainstream parties, trade unions, churches, clubs, etc.) which are both crumbling and resisting at the same time, thus resulting in an incomplete representational ‘void’. This configuration comes with ambivalent effects: on the one hand, the erosion opened a political space for the rise of populist contenders, on the other, the partial resilience limited the capacity of these contenders to reshape political identities along new lines. This hybrid situation, in turn, put populist actors in front of inextricable dilemmas of ideological, organisational and strategic nature. Should they keep a transversal and ‘post-ideological’ approach or relocate themselves more clearly on the revitalised left-right axis of confrontation? Should they stick to their organisational innovations (digital and light forms of organisation) or try to build a more classic, territorialized and formalized, party structure? Should they jealously preserve their externality vis-à-vis the other actors of the party system or opt for strategic alliances? The paper compares three emblematic political movements of this ‘populist wave’ in the South of Europe: Podemos, la France insoumise and the Five Star Movement. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted with party members between 2019 and 2021, it studies how those dilemmas have unfolded in three different contexts, depending on the specific configuration of political competition in each country. It shows that, despite their differences and against strong internal resistances, all these actors have endured a process of normalization entailing the progressive downplaying of the populist approach, the formalization and territorialization of party structures, and the alliance with the centre-left force of the spectrum.