Non-populist parties and populist rhetoric: narratives and crisis of representation

When reviewing the literature about populism, one finds that it is tricky to determine what makes a political party or leader a populist, as well as labelling any given political rhetoric as ‘populist rhetoric’. Nonetheless, there have been recent attempts at clarifying what the populist phenomenon entails, and given the populist moment of our time, this has become one of the main political challenges for political theorists and scholars overall. Two main approaches to the issue can be distinguished: a formal approach and an ideational approach. The formal approach has been famously defended by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and it features populism as a type of discourse that, in large part in virtue of its argumentative character, appears as a condition of possibility for political action. On the other hand, the ideational approach, defended by authors such as Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, focuses on populism as a set of ideas that can be combined with other ideological features that lie at the core of populist speech. Both perspectives coincide, whether it be by an ideological feature or the creation of political identities through discourse, that populists separate society axiologically in two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’. They also claim sole political and moral representation of ‘the people’, thus branding those excluded as enemies. Populists can argue, when not in power, that Parliament, the courts or any state institution are occupied by the elite, alienating the ‘true people’ that only populists can represent. When in power, all opposition is presented as illegitimate, as the “reaction” to true popular sovereignty. To claim an exclusive representation is paramount to understand why populist parties seem to thrive in moments of social and economic crisis, as they appear to canalize the wishes and demands of the populace that mainstream parties supposedly ignore provoking, therefore, a crisis of representation. These are exceptional moments that are called, by authors like Laclau, of ‘populist rupture’. It is a constant already seen in the 2008 economic crisis, the 2015 migratory crisis and, once again, with the covid-19 pandemic. Another consequence of this is the shift in discourse that some mainstream parties, both right and left, showed since 2008, to counteract the populist boom in those countries where it became prominent, adopting themselves many features of populist rhetoric and reproducing similar narratives. This shift in non-populist parties is what this paper aims to address, proposing the following research question: Is it possible to differentiate between populist and non-populist parties? As the paper’s working hypothesis states, it is not if one understands populism as a way to access a set of argumentative tools aimed at reaching and maintaining power, that is, another political tool. The paper will consider its relevance to democratic representation with the example of the coalition government, since January 2020, of the Socialist Party and Unidas Podemos (United We Can) in Spain to illustrate its argument.