Veridiction and Leadership in Transnational Populism: the Case of Diem25
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Politics and Governance (ISSN: 2183–2463) 2020, Volume 8, Issue 1, Pages 217–225 DOI: 10.17645/pag.v8i1.2539 Article Veridiction and Leadership in Transnational Populism: The Case of DiEM25 Evangelos Fanoulis 1 and Simona Guerra 2,* 1 Department of International Relations, Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University, 215123 Suzhou, China; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK; E-Mail: [email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 3 October 2019 | Accepted: 16 January 2020 | Published: 5 March 2020 Abstract While research tends to explore questions of power and leadership at the national level, populism in Europe has moved be- yond national borders, with an increasing number of transnational movements and organizations. This article investigates the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) and its leadership’s main speeches. Informed by both discourse theory and Michel Foucault’s work on parrhesia (veridiction), the analysis draws on readings of transnational Euroalternativism and populism, pointing out the conflicting logic of bringing them together at the transnational level. Our findings thus stress the increasing politicization of European integration as an opportunity to mobilize transnational activities, which are based on the populist ‘people vs. the elites’ dichotomy and against Brussels’ unaccountable elites (see FitzGibbon & Guerra, 2019), while indicating the limits of leadership in a populist transnational movement (de Cleen, Moffitt, Panayotu, & Stavrakakis, 2019; Marzolini & Souvlis, 2016). Keywords discourse analysis; Euroalternativism; leadership; parrhesia; power relations; transnational populism Issue This article is part of the issue “Leadership, Populism and Power” edited by Cristine de Clercy (Western University, Canada). © 2020 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction pointment and distrust in how the EU works (Panayotu, 2017). Its critical stances towards the EU—here defined The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) of- as Euroalternative, as explained below—translated into ficially took off at the Volksbühne (the ‘People’s Theatre’) electoral gains in the recent Greek national elections, in Rosa Luxembourg Platz, in Berlin, on Tuesday 9th where the movement’s electoral wing, under the lead- February 2016. Since then, DiEM25 has developed as a ership of Varoufakis, gained 3.44% of the national vote pan-European political movement whose raison d’être and nine seats in the country’s parliament (“Final results is the democratization of the European Union (EU; of Greek national elections,” 2019). Moffitt, 2017). The movement’s founding fathers, for- The success of DiEM25 should be seen within the mer Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Croatian context of increasing populism in Southern Europe. philosopher Srećko Horvat have presented European cit- Considering the EU technocrats and bureaucrats in izens with two simple choices regarding the EU’s fu- Brussels to be suppressors of the citizens’ voice in ture. The institutions, policies and procedures of the European governance (DiEM25, n.d.-b), the movement EU will either become more democratic or the Union has embraced the populist dichotomist logic of people will disintegrate (DiEM25, n.d.-a). In the meantime, the vs. the elites (Laclau, 2005a; Mudde, 2004; Stavrakakis, EU’s multiple crises have meant that DiEM25 now res- 2017). DiEM25’s criticism of the EU is its primary politi- onates with citizens across Europe who share disap- cal strategy, bringing together heterogeneous public de- Politics and Governance, 2020, Volume 8, Issue 1, Pages 217–225 217 mands, all under the people’s concept (see also de Cleen, 2. Laclau’s Populism and Foucault’s Parrhesia Glynos, & Mondon, 2018). As argued elsewhere, the combination of a critical narrative towards the EU and Laclau (2005a) developed an account of populism cen- a populist logic is not a new phenomenon in Southern tred on key concepts of his discourse theory, namely Europe. It can be traced back to the national political suc- logics of difference and equivalence, internal frontier cesses of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (Fanoulis and antagonism, and empty signifiers. First of all, Laclau & Guerra, 2017; Kioupkiolis & Katsambekis, 2018). Yet, lit- presents populism as a distinct “political logic” (Laclau, tle research has been published regarding the combina- 2005a, p. 117) and a “logic of articulation” (Laclau, 2005b, tion of transnational opposition to European integration, p. 33) that brings together heterogeneous public de- termed Euroalternativism (FitzGibbon & Guerra, 2019), mands as they emerge in society. This process is both so- and populism. cial and relational. As Laclau (2005a, p. 73) writes, “‘the In order to fill this gap, our analysis examines the use people’ is not something of the nature of an ideological of Euroalternativist discourses by the political leadership expression, but a real relation between social agents.’’ in transnational populism, using DiEM25 as its case study. But how is it possible that highly diverse socio- Expanding on recent studies (de Cleen, Moffitt, Panayotu, political demands, coming from a plethora of societal & Stavrakakis, 2019; Moffitt, 2017), our research ques- actors with highly differentiated political identities can tion asks whether the movement’s leadership has suc- be jointly articulated? Two processes appear to happen ceeded in constructing a transnational people by capital- in parallel, one based on a logic of difference and one izing on Euroalternative discourse. We also ask to what on a logic of equivalence. On the one hand, public de- extent DiEM25’s main political figure, Yanis Varoufakis, mands have to maintain their uniqueness in the societal has managed to bring the peoples of Europe together realm so as satisfy the distinct groups or actors articu- by telling them the truth about the misdeeds and short- lating them. On the other hand, their plurality gets ac- comings of the EU. Using discourse theory and Michel knowledged in a democratic society according to a logic Foucault’s work on parrhesia (veridiction), our empiri- of equivalence, that means they are understood to be of cal investigation looks at the speeches of Varoufakis, try- equal democratic importance (Laclau, 2005b). ing to capture whether the political truth, as articulated In lines with populist reasoning, there needs to be by the movement’s leader, has resonated with the peo- some sort of pairing of these heterogeneous demands, ples in the EU so much so as to construct one transna- whilst maintaining their ‘particularity’ to use Laclau’s tional people. Our main contention is that the pursuit of own words. This can occur by tying them up in a chain of truth somehow gets stuck in the difficult passage from equivalence. The chain of equivalence downplays the ele- national to transnational populism. In terms of discourse ment of heterogeneity and socially constructs an analogy theory, signifiers such as ‘change the EU’ or ‘for a more between the public demands, which is then able to keep democratic Europe’ are used tendentially in Varoufakis’ them together. There is an inherent tension in this pro- Euroalternativist discourse as unspoken truths. They can cedure, also acknowledged by Laclau (2005a, p. 122) “so bring together the notion of the people, but also establish the equivalential chain necessarily plays a double role: an internal frontier in Europe’s social space between an it makes the emergence of the particularism of the de- ‘us, the pan-European people’ versus ‘them, the Brussels’ mands possible but, at the same time, it subordinates elites.’ Thus, the focus of our study lies on how the move- them to itself as a necessary surface of inscription.” ment’s leader makes use of a Euroalternativist truth in or- Yet, for the equivalential chain to be able to subordi- der to establish a transnational European people. nate the public demands to itself, it needs to recalibrate The analysis will proceed as follows. Section 2 them around features they share even in their distinctive presents our theoretical framework, i.e., Laclau’s basic uniqueness. Simply put, there needs to be a kind of ‘glue’ concepts in his theory of populism and the Foucauldian that can stick the public demands together. For Laclau, notion of parrhesia. Section 3 revisits the emergence of this is done by means of introducing an internal frontier DiEM25 by rereading its manifesto, with topical empha- in the society, splitting the social space into two camps. sis on its references to populism and Euroalternativism— The ‘glue’ that brings together the heterogeneous pub- having introduced the latter as a contemporary form of lic demands is their common political aversion towards pro-systemic opposition towards the EU. Section 4 con- an antagonistic other, a common political adversary that sists of a brief note justifying our methodological choices. does not allow for these demands to be satisfied (Laclau, In the section that follows, we present a discourse analy- 2005a, p. 131). sis of key speeches of Yanis Varoufakis, as the leader of This ‘glue’ is the notion of the people for Laclau. DiEM25. Having elaborated on how the question of lead- The people is a signifier which aligns the heterogeneous ership affects the transnational expansion of DiEM25, public