Populist Narratives in Local and Regional Governance? from the Manifesto to the Government

During the last decade, a new wave of populist narratives has emerged, not only in specific movements or organisations but also as components of the discourse of institutionalised and traditional parties. In the case of Spain, the 2011 movements known as “the indignados” was crucial in the creation of a new political force, Podemos. Literature tends to agree on the existence of a populist component in Podemos (Llamazares & Gómez-Reino, 2015; Kioupkiolis, 2016; Ferrada Stoehrel, 2016; MacMillan, 2017; Rodríguez Alguilera de Prat, 2015; Sola & Rendueles, 2017; Pavía et alt., 2016). We should also note that Podemos is a very unique example of populism since it involves an atypical crossover between three types of populist movement: a populist social movement (Indignados, or ‘Outraged’), a personalist leader with a populist tendency (Pablo Iglesias) and, finally, the construction of a populist party (Podemos) (Mudde & Rovira, 2019: 25). On the other side of the ideological axis, VOX has also become a major political actor in Spanish politics. The majority of the studies cite VOX as an example of the populist radical right-wing in Europe, forming part of the same ideological family as the Flemish Vlaams Belang, the Austrian FPÖ and the French Font National. From the few studies which do exist on VOX, it has been possible to observe some common points: they all remark the nationalist, conservative (Rubio-Pueyo, 2019; Jurado and Riera, 2019) and Eurosceptic (Delfino, 2019) component; they highlight the emergence of the discourse of VOX in Spanish politics and the effects that this is having on the national right-wing parties, such as the People’s Party and Citizens (Rubio-Pueyo, 2019; Jurado and Riera, 2019). Both parties had the first contact with the process of governance at the local level. This paper aims to explore the performance of these parties in local and regional governance and the evolution of their discourse once confronted with the institutional structure. In order to analyse this evolution, we have selected three different cases of cities or regional governments where VOX and Podemos have governed or have become influent in the policymaking process.