Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe: Dispatches from the Case of Syriza

More than a decade has now passed since the "Eurozone crisis." Few words were more used than "populism" and "austerity" during this period. The former was weaponized by mainstream political forces to downgrade anyone who strived to express popular demands contra to the will of the supposedly independent markets.¹ Austerity, for its part, was presented as a tough yet the only available medicine to reestablish market confidence and secure the viability and health of the financial system. The health of the markets and the financial system, however, has proved incompatible with both the health of democratic institutions and—literally—the health of citizens across Europe. The market constituency became superior to the original democratic constituency, the people.²

Austerity pushed a growing number of people into poverty, especially in the peripheral countries—Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus—whereas European banks have been rescued and recapitalized. There have been major cuts to wages and pensions, social benefits, the health-care system coupled with an assault on labor rights and a massive rise in unemployment.³ The loss of prosperity and various rights produced mass anti-austerity mobilizations. The Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi are perhaps the most popular cases but the Portuguese Geração à Rasca, or the Irish Occupy in Cork and Dublin and the Right2Water protests, or, finally, the Cypriot Alliance Against the Memorandum, are not insignificant. These were some of the largest mobilizations in the histories of these countries, indicating that austerity policies suffered from a lack of consensus and legitimacy.

The populist character of these movements and mobilizations is to be found in their basic claim that "the people had been betrayed by the political elites, which were held responsible for the socio-economic collapse and the hollowing out of democratic institutions."⁴ The populist radical-left anti-austerity wave that emerged at this juncture expressed the demand to break with the austerity policies and offer an alternative vision. Their radicalism is located precisely in their aim to fundamentally challenge the neoliberal status quo and fight for a democratic renewal in the EU.⁵ In this context there have been various voices that saw in left populism a chance for the "democratic refoundation of Europe."⁶

My aim in this article is to explore the lessons that can be learnt for left-wing populism from the last decade of crises. Drawing upon the "Essex School," populism is understood here as a political logic marked by the discursive construction of a popular subjectivity, a "we, the people" and its antagonistic other, a "they, the establishment."⁷ "The people" in this schema is always the contingent product of a process of linking together a set of unsatisfied demands expressed by diverse groups through a shared opposition. When this populist logic is coupled with a desire to get to the roots⁸ of the problems of the existing system and transform it, we are faced with a more or less radical articulation of populism.⁹

My main focus will be the case of Syriza and one of the key questions here is whether populism was responsible for the debacle of the Syriza-led government in the summer of 2015. Does Syriza's defeat prove the limitations of left-wing populism at the national level in fighting against policies that have been orchestrated and coordinated at the EU level? My hypothesis is that Syriza reflects a structural limit that all left populist forces on the national level are destined to confront. The article also reflects on the possibilities of expanding populism from the national to the transnational level.

The Deepening of Postdemocracy and the Populist Response

Few would deny that European democracy reached a dark moment during the Eurozone crisis. The overall management of the crisis has indeed produced an ever more postdemocratic union. One can understand postdemocracy as a "democracy after the demos,"¹⁰ a situation where "politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times."¹¹ The European Union...