Civil society, liberalism and opposition to populist parties in Europe

This paper presents a theoretical framework for studying effectiveness of IoPPs by civil society actors in Europe. While opponents of populism sometimes use political violence or the threat of it when they oppose populist parties, most of the time they adopt adversarial modes of engagement with populist parties. Adversarialism adheres to liberal norms of civility (Keene) in which opposition is conceived as non-violent engagement with opponents despite sometimes profound disagreement. It conceives of effective opposition to populist parties as the achievement of goals of opposition without achieving perverse effects. Goals of opposition to populist parties are reducing support for populist parties, diminishing their material, organizational, and moral resources, ideological moderation and curbing their ability to implement illiberal or undemocratic policies. Perverse effects are increased support for populist parties, boosting populist party resources, and the ideological radicalization of populist parties. Civil society actors can achieve these goals in three main ways: Firstly, they can do so by staging disruptive protests to create social leverage exploiting dependency of governments on political stability and consent of the governed. Secondly, protests, media campaigns, public critique at home and abroad may persuade, stigmatize, or shame others not to support populist parties. Civil society IoPPs can achieve these goals by forming alliances with other powerful actors such as political parties able to use their governing resources against populist parties, or through litigation, by coopting the coercive authority of the state to enforce the decisions of the courts. Perverse effects may follow the effective mobilization of populist counter-discourses, linking opponents to elites or ‘others’ denigrated in populist discourse. The plausibility of these theoretical constructs is shown using contemporary illustrations of these effects and processes.