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  • Between Radical Democracy and Left Populism on the MarginsProtest Politics and Organization in the Left Front (Russia) and the Left Opposition (Ukraine)
  • Seongcheol Kim

Introduction

In discussions of global protest waves, the "For fair elections" protests in Russia (2011–2013) and the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine (2013–2014) take on a somewhat ambivalent positioning: compared to most "color revolutions," both movements featured a more party-independent, decentralized, even leaderless dynamic1—which, in addition to the central repertoire of public square occupations, is reminiscent of "movements of the squares" such as 15-M or Occupy Wall Street—while, at the same time, appearing to lack the clear-cut radical-democratic thrust of the latter movements. Indeed, within the growing body of cross-national research on the movements of the squares from the angle of radical-democratic theory and/or radical-democratically inspired approaches to populism research,2 [End Page 113] "For fair elections" and Euromaidan have largely been ignored. What is it about the demand for "fair elections" or "European integration," after all, that is radical-democratic?3 While a systematic treatment of this question is beyond the scope of this article, the analysis that follows sheds light on groupings that openly experimented with radical-democratic—as well as left-populist—politics in the context of the "For free elections" and Euromaidan protests, respectively: the Left Front (LF) in Russia and the Left Opposition (LO)4 in Ukraine. Although both organizations played minor roles (to differing degrees) in the protests, they point unmistakably to the constitutive heterogeneity and, not least, radical contingency encapsulated by these protest movements, both of which sought to bring about a rupture with existing constellations of power and rendered visible the contingent foundations of political authority—following here a broadly Lefortian understanding of (radical) democracy—which, however, stood in tension with the closure of this democratic horizon by state repression and, in the case of Euromaidan, far-right violence.

It is within this ultimately shrinking space that radical left-wing groups experimented with new (albeit small-scale) forms of political organization in the aftermath of the protests: a "movement party" in the case of the LO and a vanguard-like "people's party of a new type" in the case of the LF—with both projects facing major limitations in the context of an "organizational ecology"5 of authoritarian consolidation (Russia) or nationalist reordering (Ukraine). As Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko have argued—reminiscent of other movements of the squares—the Russian and Ukrainian protest episodes present paradigmatic examples of "eventful identity,"6 whereby the experiences on the squares constituted founding moments of collective identity-building projects, opening up a "new political cycle" (as is often said of the post-Indignados context in Spain, for example) within which subsequent political processes, including the post-squares organizational experiments on the radical Left, can be situated.

This article proceeds by first providing a brief overview of the conceptual framework of radical democracy, populism, and hegemony as informed by postfoundational discourse theory as well as its implications for questions of organization, drawing here a basic distinction between horizontal autonomy and vertical representation. This is followed by an empirical analysis consisting of three main steps: (1) an overview of developments on the radical Left in [End Page 114] Russia and Ukraine "before the squares"; (2) a discussion of the strategies of the Left Front and the Left Opposition in the "For fair elections" and Euromaidan protests, respectively; and (3) an examination of post-squares experiments in new forms of organization, including the LF's "left-patriotic" turn and the LO's spearheading of the party project "Social Movement."

Radical Democracy, Populism, Hegemony

This article takes its bearings from an understanding of populism and radical democracy as two forms (among others) of politics-as-hegemony7 standing in a relationship of productive but irreducible tension. As I have argued elsewhere,8 radical democracy following Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's early joint work9 can be understood as a politics of autonomy grounded in a recognition of contingency: the contingency of social identities means that ever newer struggles for emancipation can emerge around ever newer claims to democratic rights...

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