Populism seen from below: reception and mobilization of populism as a discourse and as a theoretical reference by Podemos and La France insoumise activists

Left-wing populist parties have been studied primarily through the prism of overarching approaches, using “cold” categories of analysis constructed on the basis of theoretical and expert criteria, and focusing on the leaders’ discourses. Few studies have focused on what the activists of these parties thought and had to say. Regarding La France insoumise (Unbowed France, LFI) and Podemos (We Can), the existing literature has (1) labelled them as populists; (2) highlighted their links with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s populist theory which has become their new “theoretical reference”. In this article, I analyze how the adoption of populism as a new discourse and as a new ideology by the leaders of LFI and Podemos impacted the activists of both movements. I look at how the activists receive the leaders’ message and then mobilize it according to their own perceptions. I aim to answer the following questions: do activists re-mobilize the populist discourse and theoretical references of the leaders unchanged? Or is there a rejection of the leaders’ message, and strong intra-partisan “militant criticism” towards it ? To answer these questions, I conducted thirty-six semi-structured interviews to allow for variation of the interviewees’ profiles (eighteen in Spain and eighteen in France). The interviews were conducted in the interviewees’ language (French/Spanish) between October 2019 and July 2020. I used a CAQDAS (NVivo) to analyze them. The analysis shows four main results. First, the activists develop a (minimal) populist discourse close to the discourse developed by the leaders of each party, as they emphasize both the importance of the people-elite axis and the desire for a radicalization of democracy. Second, the activists who identify with the left the most reject populism as a theoretical reference more easily, while activists who reject the left-wing identity referred to the populist theory more. Third, I drew up a typology of activists, I distinguished between converted activists (for whom populism is the main identity), pragmatic activists (who see populism as a strategy for winning votes in elections), ambivalent activists (who consider that populism is an interesting phase for gaining visibility but that it can be dangerous), and reluctant activists (who see populism as a danger because it blurs the lines with the extreme right). Fourth, I zoomed on the “converted” activists who brandish populism as a new identity, backed by a rhetoric and an ideological corpus. Most of them left LFI and Podemos considering that the restructuration of the left around populism could not take place in their organizations because of the strong reluctance of part of well-integrated actors who belong to what they consider being the “old left”.