Donald J. Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a meeting of NATO Heads of State and Government in Brussels. Robin Utrecht/Press Association. All rights reserved.
RETHINKING POPULISM.; At a
time when new political actors are mounting electoral and increasingly systemic
challenges to contemporary democracies in the name of the people, there is
little consensus in what the phenomenon is among academics, political activists
and citizens alike. openDemocracy has been featuring articles on populist
phenomena for some years (Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Mouffe, Marlière, Pappas,
Skodo, Sofos, Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, Gerbaudo, Gandesha, Tamás to name
but a few) and has been successful in stimulating a recurring interest. But
despite or perhaps because of the extensive and thought-provoking research on
populism, the term has come to denote a range of widely diverse phenomena.
Our aim is
to bring together voices that don’t often interact, either because they belong
to different fields of work, or as a result of geographical distance, to
contribute to a vigorous and constructive debate and the cross-fertilization of
different strands within the populism theoretical oeuvre. This is not only in
pursuit of theoretical and conceptual clarity, but it is also an issue of
practical urgency if we are to develop effective, progressive political
strategies.
In
his article discussing
the Turkish presidential and parliamentary election of 24 June, Omer Tekdemir
provides an interesting evaluation of the positions and discourse of the three
major contenders; the ‘left-leaning populist’ – as he characterizes it – ‘Peoples’
Democracy Party’ (HDP), the Kemalist secular populist ‘Republican Peoples’
Party’ (CHP) and the right-wing conservative populist, ‘Justice and Development
Party’ (AKP). Identifying a number of
qualitative differences between the contenders, Tekdemir does not hesitate to
call them all populist.
This
constitutes a thought-provoking contribution to the relevant debate, worth
engaging with for a number of reasons. First, it prompts us to think the very
complex case of Turkey, a society with a long tradition of extraparliamentary
governance (i.e. army interventions, tutelary restrictions to democratic
governance), usually legitimized through appeals to a transcendental national
will and unity, using the lens of the theory(ies) of populism, at a critical
juncture when so-called populist parties and leaders seem to be setting the
tune of political developments worldwide.
Second,
it implicitly, yet clearly, suggests that in such a society an effective
challenge to the hegemony of the ‘conservative populist’ AKP and its leader can
be mounted through a progressive populist response. And – although in passing –
it recognizes in the attempt of Jeremy Corbyn to reconfigure Labour and
progressive politics in the UK a similar radical democratic populist agenda, a
potential blueprint for a democratizing populism of the left.
Drawing
on a rich theoretical tradition, namely the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical
democracy, Tekdemir adopts a
version of ‘[t]he discursive hegemonic approach of Laclau
[that] identifies populism as something that constructs the political in terms of
the people (the underdog) versus elites (the establishment)’, hastening to add
that, of course, populism ‘can either further or frustrate democratic ends’.
However, as
my own understanding of populism largely draws (eclectically) on the same
theoretical tradition, I believe we can go further in doing justice to the richness
and complexity of Laclau’s argument in its application to the example of
Turkey. Moreover, my aim in this discussion is to take up the
challenge of Tekdemir’s argument as an opportunity to think aloud about the
state of our engagement with populism not only as academics, but also as
activists and citizens.
Tekdemir’s argument
Premised
on a discussion of the contenders’ discursive strategies, Tekdemir is not alone in suggesting
that all three have adopted a populist discourse. Emre Erdoğan, Tuğçe
Erçetin and Jan Philipp Thomeczek also point out the prevalence of a populist rhetoric
as far as the aforementioned parties and their leaderships are concerned. And
like them, Tekdemir argues that the AKP discourse displays exclusionary themes,
as opposed to the discourses of its rivals, and identifies a number of interesting qualitative
differences between the contenders.
Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, he argues, for example, that the HDP’s populist discourse
is qualitatively different from that of its political adversaries as it
‘established a chain of equivalence between its diverse components without
essentialising Kurdish identity over other alliances, using radical democracy
as a common point of affiliation’, expressing ‘the demands of diverse groups …
in an inclusive left-wing populism’. He contrasts this sub-genre of populism,
to the more conservative and authoritarian one of the AKP that employed the
discourse of ‘the People’ against the Kemalist status quo, before giving it later
a more religious, and recently a nationalist emphasis. Tekdemir juxtaposes this
brand of populism to what he intriguingly calls ‘the humanitarian populist
leadership’ of CHP candidate, Muharrem İnce that, in his opinion, represents a
‘successful social democratic populism’ although, unfortunately, he does not
elaborate on this ‘populist’ current.
Complicating
the situation, to his distinction between the populisms of the AKP, CHP and
HDP, Tekdemir adds a further example, that of the Gezi protest movement which
he paradoxically defines as ‘an irregular, populist social movement [that]
rejected the existing representative democracy … as the mass of ordinary people
… were not represented by the elitist centre-right and centre-left parties’.
Despite
the nuanced character of these interventions, Tekdemir’s, as well as, to a
lesser extent, Erdoğan, Erçetin and Thomeczek’s discussion referred to above, seem
to identify virtually every expression of collective action in Turkish politics
as populist. Why is that? Is populism endemic in Turkish politics? Does it
constitute a dominant trope of articulating interests, demands, fears and
aspirations? One would argue both yes and no depending on one’s definition of
populism and, indeed, there are many available
to choose from.
To
be fair, Tekdemir hints at more elements of a definition that are worth
considering – and these provide very interesting signposts for a debate on
populism. He identifies the centrality of the notion of equivalence, a notion
that is often used rather descriptively without consideration of its
implications for the way political identities work; he interestingly implies that
Erdoğan, İnce and Demirtaş, the imprisoned co-chair of the HDP, are all ‘in
some sense’ unequivocally charismatic, or at least ‘charming’, although he leaves
the reader in suspense as to the location and role, if any at all, of charisma in
his theoretical toolkit. In this respect, his fourth example, Gezi, must fail to
qualify, given the lack of a clearly identifiable leadership that could display
such charms. So again, we need to refine our terms. Finally, the article points
out the indeed interesting ambiguity between the CHP’s institutional/vertical
politics and the ‘individual/horizontal populist’ style of leadership of its
presidential candidate, Muharrem İnce – a discrepancy that also begs for further
discussion on the relationship of organizations and leaderships and their
respective discursive logics, as well as the roles of mediation and
representation in populist politics.
Turkey
is indeed a challenging case that can lure researchers to the appeal of a
minimal (as proposed by Cas Mudde)
understanding of populism, but also to the comfort of a
conceptual/terminological laxity, I would argue, that deprives the concept of
the critical edge and the political utility that it should, in my opinion,
have. If, following Ben Stanley
as well as Mudde, we accept that populism is in practice a complementary
ideology, one that 'does not so much overlap with, as diffuse itself throughout
full [sic] ideologies’, we may end up with a theoretical framework that renders
any reference to the people as part of a binary understanding of the
political sufficient to qualify as populist. But what would happen if we
were to probe a little more rigorously into the modalities of the
construction of ‘the people’ and then discuss which of these may justifiably
make sense being labeled ‘populist’ ?
What
is more, in a system where the election of an executive president relies on
securing the support of an absolute majority of the electorate, candidates are
compelled to forge coalitions that will bring together diverse political
constituencies and to develop a language and a logic that will ensure the
coherence and durability of the latter. This can be a populist language that
will reproduce antagonistic understandings of the political field, where
adversaries are seen as enemies with irreconcilable and mutually incompatible
interests, and that will privilege, as Mudde argues ‘the
people’ as the incarnation of a general will – and, I would add, a concomitant
notion of collective, as opposed to particularistic or individual, rights and
interests.
On
the other hand, alternative popular, yet not populist discourses can deploy a
language that recognizes ‘the popular’ as diverse, compatible with the existence
of particularistic interests, the product of continual processes of
construction of shared horizons and solidarities where the ‘other’ is a mere
adversary. In this case, I would argue – and of course this is open to debate,
thin definitions of populism like the one identified above, in the first case,
serve as labels with insufficient conceptual depth or political utility.
To return to the examples used by Tekdemir, whereas the
AKP/MHP ‘People’s Coalition’ advocates without any inhibition a host of
punitive administrative, judicial and extra-institutional measures to
effectively destroy, symbolically and/or physically, anyone who contradicts the
‘national will’ and brands ‘others’ as terrorists and enemies (purges and
vilification already intensifying a few days after the election), I have
difficulty considering as similarly populist the more pluralistic discourse of
the HDP. Indeed the latter is largely devoid of the conspiratorial, phobic
elements of the discourse of the ‘People’s Coalition’ that prioritizes and
validates national unity and homogeneity (premised on ethnicity or religion) at
the expense of particularistic and individual rights.
The same can be argued about the unity, or rather
solidarity, encapsulated in the so-called Gezi spirit. Indeed, the latter was definitely
not perceived in timeless and transcendental terms but was understood and
experienced as something akin to what Ernest Renan called a daily plebiscite, a tense
yet creative coexistence continually tested and reaffirmed and premised on
respect for difference. As I have argued elsewhere,
Gezi was a fluid and multifaceted movement/moment characterized by a
multicentric culture of contestation, a shared and constantly and openly
negotiated universe of discourse and action.
This does not of course deny the thread that provided
some degree of coherence through this polyphonic universe, the interaction and
formation of shared frameworks that make the diversity of the experiences of protesting
participants intelligible and relevant to individuals and groups that would
otherwise be ‘relative strangers’. Indeed, the symbolic
and material violence exercised by the government largely shaped the attitudes, perceptions and actions of those protestors
and provided the raw material for the construction of shared injustice frames and a clear divide between the protesters and the regime.
But, having said that, the distinctive quality of this –
momentary – achieved togetherness cannot justify subsuming Gezi in the same
political subspecies of populism as the AKP/MHP coalition or even that of the CHP/İYİ/Saadet
Parti. My skepticism regarding such a line of argumentation extends
considerably beyond the actual case of Gezi. It relates to the need to develop
theoretically and historically informed definitions that can allow us to
explore critically the phenomenon of populism in an array of societies beyond
Turkey. Tekdemir himself points out that Gezi has been compared to the anti-austerity
mobilizations, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, all different
instances of collective action, in different contexts but bearing some
similarities worth considering.
The Turkish case with its prolonged transition from
Kemalism to a post-Kemalist era, with multiple elections impacting on political discourse,
with the frequent recourse of political actors to extra-institutional
legitimation, with a cult of messianic leadership and the primacy of the
collective rights of the nation embedded in its political culture provides a
fertile ground both for the study but also for the misrecognition of populism.
Tekdemir’s approach, in my opinion, therefore opens up an interesting
discussion on the utility of our current theoretical toolkit, its utility and
its limitations.
Re-thinking populism: a tentative agenda
We are clearly at an important juncture, both
theoretically and politically. There is broad consensus on some of the
characteristics of populism as most theorists understand it nowadays. This
relates to the minimal definition as proposed by key contributors in the debate
such as Mudde who see
populism as more or less a ‘thin ideology that considers society to be
essentially divided between two antagonistic and homogeneous groups, the pure
people and the corrupt elite, and wants politics to reflect the general will of
the people’.
This allows the researcher to recognize populist traits
in diverse movements and types of mobilization, and even potentially classify grassroots
(or square) movements such as Gezi as populist. Such an approach recognizes a
political Zeitgeist increasingly characteristic of the current conjuncture. It
also implies that the success story of populist mobilizations need not be exclusively
a property of authoritarian or conservative leaderships but can be emulated by
the left as long as the popular is defined in progressive, democratic terms.
This is something implicit in another important current in the study of
populism epitomized in the work of Chantal Mouffe whose latest book, For a Left Populism
has just been released. Drawing on Laclau’s earlier work on populism as well as
their work on radical democracy, Mouffe argues in
favour of a qualitatively different populism that will be best placed to
counter and challenge reactionary, xenophobic versions of populism as well as
inherently undemocratic, neoliberal technocratic political modes of governance,
suggesting that populism ‘is not an ideology or a political regime, and cannot
be attributed to a specific programmatic content. It is compatible with
different forms of government. It is a way of doing politics which can take
various forms, depending on the periods and the places. It emerges when one aims
at building a new subject of collective action – the people – capable of
reconfiguring a social order lived as unfair’.
My own skepticism lies in the fact that both dominant
trends in the current discussion on populism, despite their distinct significant
contributions, privilege form over content. It is sufficient for any of those
adhering to their definitions to ‘cry populism’ as soon as a political actor
adopts a rhetoric that distinguishes the pure people (incarnating a general
will) from the corrupt elites. Yet, one could wonder, is this ‘thin ideology’
trope sufficient to make sense of populism? Is populism just an aggregate of
beliefs in the goodness of the people, the corruption of the elites and the
sanctity of the general will? Is it only tantamount to the deployment of a
rhetoric that reflects that? Mudde himself is clear. Different populists and
different populisms adopt different styles of government and different
policies, so there is no use looking further afield from whatever fulfils his
minimal definition. And Mouffe’s point about the centrality of discursively
‘reconfiguring a social order lived as unfair’ does not do justice to the
different ways in which subjects of collective action can be imagined and
constructed.
A
similar understanding of ‘populism as discourse’ or ‘rhetoric’ is also
suggested by Ruth Wodak. However
she hastens to stress that the term, as she uses it, refers to a rhetoric of
exclusion and what I would call the discursive construction of fear, mainly characteristic
of the politics of right-wing populist parties
that endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded –
explicitly or coded – in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge
of ‘the people’. Despite certain reservations which I will outline in the
remainder of this note, I tend to find more mileage in this latter approach as
it allows us to construct a more rigorous definition of populism that does not
exhaust itself in the realm of rhetoric but probes into the material dimensions
of discourse – exclusion and the processes of construction of societal
insecurity.
Taking
my cue from Tekdemir’s attempt to make sense of the complex terrain of Turkish
politics at a period of intense polarization, and from the different
theoretical propositions sketched above, I am suggesting that despite the fact
that we are witnessing the emergence of a populist Zeitgeist worldwide, we run
the danger of developing conceptual and operational definitions of populism
that do not meet the theoretical challenges of the phenomenon or the political
exigencies of our time.
Yet
there are sufficient commonalities in what appears to be a cacophonic universe
made up by exclusivist movements and parties that construct definitions of the
situation along phobic lines, to compel us to develop a deeper theory and a more
clearly demarcated concept of populism. This would allow us to draw a clear
line between populist politics and a ‘skin-deep’ rhetoric that is inspired by
the emergence and relative success of populist movements as in the case of the
adoption of some aspects of populist discourse by mainstream political parties
as I have suggested elsewhere.
There
is no doubt of the utility of the existing theoretical frameworks. What we need
however is a rigorous and constructive debate on how we can develop an
understanding of populism that has a critical edge and a conceptual definition
that adequately situates the latter vis a vis other concepts and conceptual
frameworks.
As
already mentioned, the binary modality of constructing the people v its ‘Other’
is more or less universally accepted within the debate. Where there is no
clarity however, is regarding the type of this binary divide running through
the political. Would such a divide reproduce understandings whereby political
adversaries are seen as effective foes (to use Carl Schmitt’s
terminology) with irreconcilable and mutually incompatible interests that need
to be silenced rather than engaged with? Would ‘the people’ be identified in
this context as the incarnation of a general will, a vehicle for reifying
and naturalizing collective, as opposed to particularistic or individual,
rights and interests? Would such modalities make citizenship dependent on
belonging in a collectivity incarnating the general will such as, say,
the national community, as in the interesting Turkish case but also in that of Nordic welfare chauvinism,
to bring two, at first sight distinct examples, together? Or are other less
acute juxtapositions of the people and its ‘others’ (I use lower case this time
on purpose), that can still allow room for the expression of social diversity, also
populist?
Another
area for exploration is the identification of populism’s polar opposites that
Mudde has rightly introduced into the research agenda. Indeed, his
identification of elitism and pluralism at the antipodes of
populism is very useful. Yet, I would argue, it does not entertain the possibility
that anti-elitism might be the opposite of populism at the level of rhetoric,
but anti-pluralism and anti-particularism might be its opposite at the level of
tangible, material political action and of governance – the terrain where
actual opponents are excluded, silenced or repressed. In fact, I would go as
far as to suggest that anti-elitism might often obscure the anti-institutional,
anti-particularistic aspects of populism and its inherent ‘aversion’ towards
assertions of social diversity.
Another
area of potential disagreement relates to the prioritization of a thin
definition of populism as an ideology (as opposed to Kurt Weyland’s preference for ‘political strategy’)
proposed by Mudde
and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (although similar
alternatives include Rogers Brubaker’s ‘populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire’). First, I would argue that a thin definition
runs the danger of reducing the concept to a mere catch-all term. The emphasis
on ideology on the grounds that the endurance of populism is linked to both
supply-side and demand side factors, although not unreasonable, is convincing
only if our understanding of politics is structured on the basis of a strict
division between governing elites (suppliers) and governed constituencies or
masses (those who articulate demand), something that underestimates the
complexity of the political process where populist discourse is articulated
both at grassroots and elite levels and takes shape as a result of complex
processes of social construction, involving numerous actors and multiple
modalities of translation and negotiation (I refer to these briefly a little
later on).
Second,
a thin definition does not allow us to establish and test at the level of operational
definitions populism’s correlation – noted by Wodak – with anti-liberal but, I
would argue, also anti-institutional and extra-institutional politics. Research
on Turkey is once more relevant here as Şakir Dinçşahin examines
the anti- and extra- institutional discourse of the AKP. But examples come also
from further afield.
As
again suggested by the case of Turkey, as well as that of Latin American
populist movements in the second half of the twentieth century, or even the
postcommunist nationalist movements of the late 1980s and 90s – we may need to
be more attentive to the frequent, although not unavoidable coupling of
populism with charismatic (and I would add ‘unitary’) types of political
leadership and, at the level of governance, preference for executive
presidential systems or systems where a unitary leadership is seen as
preferable to the more ‘corrupt’ and ‘divisive’ representative character of
parliamentary systems.
Margaret Canovan
also notes the overwhelming dependence of ‘new populist movements’ on personal
leadership rather than institutional party structures and I would argue that
there is at least a symbolic logic in this preferred leadership modality given
the effective redundancy of institutions representing social diversity in a
political imaginary where the people possesses one will and demands to exercise
‘its’ sovereignty. Some theorists will however argue that there is not
sufficient evidence to warrant such a concern as contemporary populist parties
are accepting the rules of parliamentary democracy and leaders depend on their
party organizations. I would retort that most ‘populist’ actors are still
relative newcomers in established parliamentary systems and, it is only in
their consolidation phase (as the cases of Poland and Hungary seems to
suggest) that they are able to act as outright systemic challengers.
Similar
conclusions can be drawn from the trajectory of the AKP
in Turkey which, prior to its consolidation, was an ardent supporter of the
country’s fragile parliamentary system, only to slide rapidly and violently towards
a personalized, presidential leadership model. Debates on the potential
extra-institutional dimension of populist politics should also encompass
legitimation avenues free of the mediation of parliamentary procedural ‘niceties’
as in cases of street democracy in
Milosevic’s Serbia or the appeals of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the national will against supreme court decisions,
or to the people in the
recent past, to mention just a few examples.
Another
important terrain that needs to be explored is that of the genealogy of
populism. Several scholars have attempted to pinpoint the moment populist
movements emerge or ideologies are articulated and/or the symbolic and cultural
archives upon which they are built. Some have identified as necessary
conditions the unfolding of crises. Andrea Pirro and Paul Taggart
unproblematically see what they call the Great Recession, the migrant crisis,
and Brexit as necessary preconditions for the ascendance of Eurosceptic,
populist forces in Europe over the past few years, while Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis Pappas
advance a similar argument. Indeed the very notion of crisis as a precondition
for the emergence of populism, as well as the rigid supply v demand distinction
is in urgent need of reconsideration. As I mentioned above, literature on
collective action and mobilization has made considerable advances in the study
of the social construction of injustice, agency and identity, and on
the production of societal insecurity
and the securitization of migration flows,
as well as in cultural alterity
in Europe. The theoretical discussion on populism and the notions of injustice
and crisis have largely remained untouched by this literature and its
potentially radical implications in terms of integrating into our understanding
of populism (i) the construction and making sense of crises, (ii) the role of the
discursive construction of fear
and insecurity, (iii) the role of emotions
as well as the (iv) impact of established cultural and discursive archives and
repertoires in this process.
There
are many more issues that could be added to any agenda comprehensively
reconsidering the concept of populism in the current moment, but I will restrict
myself to one final question that I have touched upon throughout this
discussion; can there be a progressive populism?
I
have argued that such latitude risks undermining the explanatory capacity of
the concept of populism as this has developed over the past couple of decades,
or even longer. My concern is not of a normative nature but one of conceptual
efficacy. It is true that, underlying the work of Laclau and of Mouffe, has
always been the question of how the Left could articulate a viable and progressive
populism. Mouffe’s For a Left Populism can be read as such a theoretically
informed programmatic text. What distinguishes left populism, says Mouffe, is
‘that “the people” is constructed democratically rather than on the basis of
nation or race. With good strategic leadership, a radically democratic and
egalitarian movement can be a match for nativism’. Tekdemir himself recognizes
in HDP, Gezi and Corbyn’s Labour party Left populist experiments along these
lines and suggests that even İnce’s discourse represents a potentially
progressive form of Social Democratic populism.
Depending
on the definition of populism one adopts, one can debate if a left variant is
possible, and if it is useful to call attempts to construct a popular subject
of collective action, or to develop politics of solidarity, populist. At the
end of the day the question is where does ‘the progressive’ lie? – in a unified
progressive, or revolutionary subject, or in a diverse solidaristic ‘coming
together’ of movements and other political actors respecting difference and
internal dialogue?
So,
Canovan’s argument that
central to populism in our democracies is an intricate balancing act between on
the one hand pragmatism – manifesting itself in their institutional frameworks
and their complex rulebooks and practices of negotiation and compromise – and on
the other the redemptive impatience inherent in the wish to be sovereign (important
in revitalizing political systems that can otherwise become ossified) is, in my
opinion, a deeply problematic one. Although I cannot disregard the prevailing
argument that the appeal to a sovereign ‘people’ in populism is in essence a
democratic one, I would say that populism shares with democratic politics the
demand for sovereignty of the citizenry but imagines this citizenry in a
fundamentally different way.
I
therefore disagree with her implication that the most privileged locus for the
revitalization of our democracies lies in redemptive politics – notably, in a
dose of populism. A redemptive politics characterized by frustration at the
rigidities of political institutions and the painstaking character of
negotiating and building solidarities, a politics of sovereignty marked by the
yearning for the excitement of unmediated spontaneity and the warmth of social
homogeneity is not necessarily, in my opinion, an element of democratic
politics, but at best, to paraphrase Lenin, an infantile disorder of democracy.
This is surely especially the case if its underlying political imaginary
supports understanding citizenship in exclusivist terms and as dependent on
belonging to an undifferentiated ‘people’.
Instead
of talking about progressive populism, perhaps progressive forces need to
engage in more complex visions of developing solidarities, dialogue and of
renewing democracies through a multitude of public spaces where power would be
rendered visible and negotiable as Alberto Melucci
has argued.
But,
at the end of the day this is precisely why we urgently need a constructive and
open dialogue between different strands of thought within the populism
theoretical ouevre. The theoretical and political dilemmas the Turkish case presents
serve as a valuable warning of the seductiveness of populism and of construing
any attempt to construct a sense of popular unity or front as populism at a
time when it is imperative for us as academics, activists and citizens alike to
make sense of the spectre of populism, if we are to develop progressive
political strategies.
