Populism in Power - A Conversation with Giorgos Venizelos

RevDem Podcast

Çağlar Öztürk: My first question concerns populism. Populism has become a fashionable term in recent years which has led to quite some confusion even among political scientists and political science students. First of all, what qualifies a politician or party as populist? How do they differ from others, from non-populist ones? What was your motivation in choosing populism as a key concept and what contribution did you intend to make with the book?

Giorgos Venizelos: There's indeed a lot of confusion about populism, even though there's so much literature about it. Without going too deep in this heated debate, I should say that scholars agree that populism is organised around two notions: people- centrism and anti-elitism. Of course, there are very different approaches to these two operational criteria related to the people and the elite.

For me, populist communication is not just about rhetoric, but also bodily gestures, accents and aesthetics that resemble, represent and enact ‘the people.’ When we talk about populism, we also talk about a certain logic, a certain style or performance. And it can also be said that populism operates with a political cleavage that is distinct from the typical left-right political cleavage – it's a cleavage between ‘the populists’ or ‘the people’ at the bottom and ‘the elite’ or ‘the anti-populists’ at the top. There is non-populist politics as well, of course, politics or discourses that do not have these characteristics or have just one of those two characteristics. For example, they talk to ‘the voter’ or ‘the citizen’ instead of ‘the people,’ or they use ‘the people’ as a term, but there's no antagonistic dimension. Vice versa, we might identify certain types of challenger parties, especially on the far right, that articulate a strong anti-establishment discourse, so there is an exclusionary element there, however, the notion of ‘the people’ as a collective identity that can supposedly fit the 'whole society' is absent.

Arguably, besides these two categories, populist and non-populist, we can have anti-populist discourses as well: politicians, journalists, and other actors may be showing a very open and clear aversion towards the notions of ‘the people,’ popular sovereignty, populist politicians, and so on. These discourses often reveal degrees of ‘democratic elitism.’

Why did I choose the concept of populism? I wanted to explain how popular identities, or mass identities, are constructed. It was at a time of mass mobilizations against austerity politics that I started thinking about Populism in Power. Discourse and Performativity in Syriza and Donald Trump. I wanted to study how electorates are mobilized in moments of crisis, how emotions are involved in such processes of political identification, and how populism is not exactly and always a negative, a mystifying or exceptional phenomenon, but rather part of everyday political life.

We have been talking mostly about populism until now, but my book is specifically about populism in power. You asked me what the intended contribution of the book is. I initially wanted to examine what happens when populists get into power – because when I was thinking about the project, prominent cases were emerging, like Syriza in Greece, but also Podemos in Spain and then later Donald Trump in the US.

I started reading into the literature of populism in power and the assumptions about what happens to populism when it moves from the opposition to government did not really convince me. The way populism – and consequently also populism in power -were conceptualized left me puzzled because I thought that scholars focused too much on the consequences of populism for democracy. For example, they would say things like “populists turn authoritarian.” Scholars also focused too much on what happens to populism itself. For example, they would say that “populism fails in power.” However, these are possibilities for other, non-populist actors as well, so why should they be so central in the debate about populism?

When talking about populism, all these assumptions end up defining the concept. I don't think that they're defining it well, but these assumptions seem to be very much discernible in the discourse of scholars. So, the idea behind my project was that in order to rethink populism in power we first have to rethink populism, re-work the way we approach it.

ÇÖ: Which theories and concepts do you draw on and how do you position your book and scholarship in the existing literature?

GV: I draw on theories of discourse and the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis in particular, but also theories of political style and socio-cultural approaches to politics. I draw on theories of affect, emotions, and collective identities.

Just to name a few authors here, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis have all had an important influence on me. Benjamin Moffitt and Pierre Ostiguy have also been important to me, but so have more traditional theories of affect, such as Freud’s or Lacan’s. I also draw on populism studies, of course.

ÇÖ: It's often maintained that there are two main strands of populism: left-wing and right-wing. What separates those two strands from each other, and why is it nonetheless adequate to refer to both as populist? More concretely, why have you chosen to study Trump and Syriza in the same framework? And what does such a juxtaposition and comparison yield?

GV: It can be argued that there are many more strands of populism besides left and right. There's also a centrist type of populism, but there are also more peculiar or even idiosyncratic formations that are hard to place on the left-right axis. However, there are indeed two main strands, left- and right-wing. I mentioned earlier that populism is about ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ but it's never just that. There's always an ideology that comes with populism.

Ideology is defined by certain programmatic features, certain ideas that have to do with equality or distribution, with inclusion and exclusion in social and political processes. For example, a left populist might be for redistribution of wealth while a right-wing populist might be pro-business. We have these programmatic ideas of the left and the right that can, however, be communicated in different ways.

In the case of populism, such classic ideas are communicated in a ‘common-sense’ way, in the name of ‘the people’ and against ‘the elites.’ ‘The people’ are suffering because ‘the elites’ push for certain policies that don't allow redistribution of wealth. Therefore, ‘the people’ should rise and take power, regulate, and achieve the redistribution they want. That’s an example of communicating a programmatic leftist agenda in a populist manner.

I should add though that there are many different types and subtypes of populism, even among the two main families that we have just been speaking about. Not all left populists are the same, nor all right-wing populists.

I chose to study Trump and Syriza because, in my view, they were populists in power who had emerged during the same conjuncture. They emerged as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism, understood not just in the economic, but also in the political sense. Technocrats appeared to be very dominant in politics, and certain types of actors or voters rejected this state of affairs. Of course, the case of Trump is not as straightforward because Trump is a pro-capitalist politician.

You also asked me about the difference between Syriza and Trump and whether the results of the comparison were surprising. One could sensibly argue that the comparison of left- and right-wing populism, such as Syriza and Trump, is not very original. However, I wanted to pursue this comparison precisely because it's quite provocative. Even if scholars, politicians, and quality journalists would typically agree that there's a difference between a left-wing and a right-wing populist, there are still many uncritical assumptions in public discourse that fail to make this basic distinction. They use a notion of populism which is little more than a synonym for bad.

What I therefore wanted to do was to show that there is a fundamental difference, and that ideology plays a key role: the way they construct the people is different, the content of their discourses and the framing of collective identities are really different in the two cases.

ÇÖ: Donald Trump and Syriza were both backed by social movements that may well have been triggered by the financial and social crisis of the preceding years. How similar or different were the respective social movements that led to their rise? Do you see social movements as essential factors in their rise, or have they merely contributed to the political momentum that was unfolding?

GV: In both cases, we saw social movements emerge as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism and to the collapse of the markets in the two countries. This may have happened at different times, but the two were part of the same conjuncture: in Greece, this took place a bit later, in 2010 and 2011, while in the US already in 2008 and 2009.

At this early stage, the movements had similar demands. There was an internationalist dimension. They somehow communicated with one another, and they even had similar slogans. There was a desire for change among participants in these ‘movements of the squares,’ ‘occupy movements,’ and so forth.

In the US, the representative of that movement to the mainstream political arena was not Donald Trump, but Bernie Sanders. However, Sanders did not make it to be the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. At the same time, we saw the rise of the Tea Party in the US, which was closer to Trump and his agenda. The Tea Party indeed played a very significant role in supporting Trump and mainstreaming his discourse.

Despite such differences, we can say that such social movements might be projecting certain social and political attitudes from below. They might also function as some kind of omen for what is about to come.

After all, both movements called out the political establishment, created new opportunities, and revealed a desire for change.

ÇÖ: In chapter four, you discuss how Syriza's retreat from its key economic promises damaged the party, especially when it comes to the emotional or effective bond between the party and its supporters. Did Syriza's populist promise fail with Alexis Tsipras' capitulation to the demands of the Troika?

GV: I could probably offer a simple answer here and say “yes, it did” but I actually think the question is much more complicated. Recall that left-wing populism is constituted by two different elements: a populist one and a leftist one.

Of course, Syriza's discourse was centred around the cancellation of austerity, neoliberalism, and so forth, which managed to mobilize the electorate in a populist way. That's why Syriza eventually won power in 2015. When it failed to deliver the key promise around which the affective climate of the time – its whole populist vibe, if you wish – was organized, we could observe a decline of emotions and identifications with the party.

The question is whether that failure had to do with populism or with the leftist component of Syriza's politics? The promise to cancel neoliberal austerity actually had to do with Syriza's anti-neoliberalism. Alexis Tsipras in fact continued to speak as a populist even after the capitulation. Does that mean that he remained a populist? That's difficult to answer.

If we understand populism as some sort of communication strategy, then we can argue that Alexis Tsipras had to maintain it. However, if we understand populism as an affective bond between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites,’ then this was no longer there. I personally think that it was a combination of the two.

To understand populism in power, we need to look at notions such as hegemony. The question would then be: did Syriza manage to establish hegemony after its capitulation? The answer is clearly “no, they did not.”

ÇÖ: What do you think about the actual policies of populists in power? Do they govern differently? And would you agree that we seem obsessed with what populist leaders or parties represent rather than focusing on what they actually do? Last but not least, how did the policies Syriza and Trump adopt influence their image?

GV: That's another difficult question to answer because it doesn't apply to all populists; different populists implement different policies. Some are more successful than others and this often has little to do with populism. It rather has to do with the context and the relative autonomy that they have.

For example, Greece is part of the European Union. When Syriza was governing, Greece was subjected to various austerity packages and memoranda, so the room for manoeuvre was limited. Certain populists simply have greater difficulties developing their own policies.

But there is also a very interesting contradiction here. Although Syriza did not manage to implement its key promise and reject austerity in Greece, it did implement policies that benefitted lower social strata. However, former supporters of Syriza on the left were not satisfied with these achievements because the party’s “big betrayal” was still on their minds and in their hearts. Syriza’s efforts to introduce a bit of social policy within a rather restricted economic and political framework did not translate into electoral support. We have seen the popularity of the party decline.

As opposed to that, Trump was much more autonomous in power. Many scholars have shown that he did not manage to pass many new policies. I remember that even The Atlantic called Donald Trump the worst president in US history. And if we consider how he handled COVID-19 and other important areas, his policy record was very poor indeed. Despite his poor policy record, his base continued to identify passionately with him.

Politics is not necessarily about rationality, it is not necessarily about policy choices, and how well politicians do in terms of implementing them. It's more about the ways in which people identify with a political actor. In 2020, Trump in fact received twelve million more votes than in 2016 – which is not to overlook that there was much more polarization, and many more people went to vote in 2020