The 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Case of Anti-Populism and Competing Populisms?

Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the political, Chantal Mouffe’s critique of “post-politics,” and Yannis Stavrakakis’s recent work on anti-populism, this paper examines 1) to what extent anti-populism is present in political parties’ campaign discourses in the 2017 Dutch, French (presidential), and German elections and 2) to what extent it takes the form of a defense of neo-liberal technocratic rationality and thus points to what Oliver Marchart refers to as a “re-politicization” of post-politics. The paper thus takes up Stavrakakis’ understanding of anti-populism as a discursive logic of equivalentially constructing a “populist” threat straddling the left/right spectrum, which, in the context of the European financial crisis, is taken up particularly by technocratic crisis-management discourses that otherwise tend to deny the need for a clash of alternatives. The paper also examines the related question to what extent populism as an analytical category – drawing here on Laclau’s theory in particular – as opposed to a discursive effect of anti-populism is applicable to the various left-wing and far-right discourses in the three elections and in what (competing) ways they posed counter-hegemonic challenges to the dominant crisis-management discourses in these countries. The discourse analysis that follows identifies a widespread “thin” anti-populism in the Netherlands that localized the “populist” threat specifically onto Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), minimal anti-populism in a French campaign characterized by competing uses of populism across the spectrum of candidates, and a fairly thick anti-populism in the discourse of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that is nonetheless largely decoupled from economic arguments. In addition, it is argued that the main far-right discourses in the Netherlands and France were primarily nationalist or “civilizationist” (following Brubaker) rather than populist – while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) combined high degrees of both populism and ethno-cultural reductionism – calling into question the inflationary use of the “populist” label as an analytical category in addition to a political-discursive one in relation to the far right in these countries. (This paper was meant to be submitted as part of the book panel "Rethinking the Concept of Politicisation", organized by Niilo Kauppi and Claudia Wiesner, and was left out due to technical difficulties with myECPR; if accepted, please assign the paper to this panel.)