Undoing Precarity: The Socio-Economic Ideology and Policy of the Movimento Cinque Stelle and Unidas Podemos

Precarity is quintessential to how people experience and talk about work in Southern Europe, but it has been politicized only in the 2010s with the rise of left-wing populist movement and parties. The present paper comparatively investigates the socio-economic policies pursued by the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy and Unidas Podemos in Spain, as well as the evolution of the socio-economic discourse driving them. Through the analysis of policy documents and secondary sources, I demonstrate that the M5S and UP share a commitment to ‘de-dualize’ the national labour market and welfare institutions, i.e. extending protection to precarious workers. This shared orientation is manifest in key policies, such as the regulation of temporary work, the substantial raise/introduction of a statutory minimum wage, and the introduction of minimum guaranteed income schemes. Mobilizing foundational party documents, I further argue that at the core of their political project lies the symbolical and material social integration of precarious workers, not dissimilar from Latin American cases (Kapiszewski et al. 2021). This opposes left populism to right populism, whose project is one of conservative safeguard of secure workers against precarious workers, while keeping them subordinate to capital (Rathgeb 2020). Despite commonalities, I argue that UP has gone far beyond the M5S in de-dualizing the labour market and the welfare state. I claim that this difference can be traced back to party ideology, as Unidas Podemos has a more radical and coherent ideology than the Five Star Movement, as largely discussed in the existing literature. Ideological specificities further explain why the M5S is generally blind or exclusionary towards women and foreign nationals, while UP purposedly links precarity with gender (and migratory background), under a radical feminist discourse.