The Populist Radical Left in Europe by Katsambekis Giorgos;Kioupkiolis Alexandros;

Author:Katsambekis, Giorgos;Kioupkiolis, Alexandros;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Populism and the left

Commentators concur that Mélenchon’s dynamic campaign galvanised large constituencies of the electorate which had stopped supporting the left (the young and the popular classes). Well-organised and active on social media, FI was built around Mélenchon’s charismatic presence and oratory skills, and it really made a difference. As the FI leader put it in the conclusion of a televised debate: ‘I want people to find the taste for happiness again’. This may sound to some a grandiloquent statement and an unrealistic target. However, this positive discourse mobilised the left altogether. It gave people a new hope after so many defeats over the past decades (Benbara 2017).

The ‘hidden transcript’ in Mélenchon’s campaign (Stavrakakis et al. 2016: 58) was the popular anger at what was largely regarded as the ‘betrayal’ of socialist principles by François Hollande as well as his broken promises. FI carried out a clever ‘war of movement’ in the Gramscian sense of the term.10

As a result, FI made important electoral gains in all social categories and in all age groups with the exception of the retired and elderly people. Mélenchon received 30 per cent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four years, but only 15 per cent of those aged sixty to sixty-nine years and 9 per cent of those aged over seventy years (Teinturier 2017).

For FI supporters, the difficulty of the task ahead was to federate voters across social groups and generations. Each of them has demands and expectations of a particular type. Some have suggested that the ‘national community’ or la patrie (motherland) could prove handy ‘empty signifiers’ which name collectively, unify and represent the chain of equivalence among popular demands that are left unsatisfied by the government (Kioupkiolis 2016: 102). Mélenchon toyed with those notions during his presidential campaign. The narrative was, roughly speaking, as follows: France is a national community based on the principle of solidarity; motherland protects the poor through the actions of the State. The aim is to produce an alternative type of patriotism, one that is progressive and opposes the xenophobic narrative of the far-right (Benbara 2017). FI, like Podemos in Spain, exemplifies a creative version of the ‘politics of the common’, that opens up to ‘ordinary people’, and resonates with ‘the common sense of social majorities beyond the left-right divide’ (Kioupkiolis 2016: 100).

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