‘I want my sovereignty back!’ A comparative analysis of the populist discourses of Podemos, the 5 Star Movement, the FN and UKIP during the economic and migration crises

ABSTRACT

The multiple crises that the EU has faced over the last decade have provided fertile ground for the emergence of new political movements, often labelled as ‘anti-system’, ‘populist’ and ‘Eurosceptics’. One defining characteristic of these parties is their claim to represent ‘the people’ and their reliance on the idea of sovereignty. This article aims at examining how these populist parties have framed sovereignty in relation to the economic and migration crises. It argues that the binary opposition between EU integration and national sovereignty does not tell the whole story, and that the populist upsurge reflects instead competing versions of sovereignty at the national level. To test this hypothesis, we conduct a corpus-based analysis of the discourse of four leading populist parties between 2012 and 2017: the Front National, the UK Independence Party, the Movimento cinque Stelle and Podemos.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• sovereignty
• front national
• UKIP
• Movimento cinque Stelle
• Podemos

Acknowledgments

This research is part of the project “Conflicts of sovereignty in the EU” financed by the ULB and the Wiener Anspach Foundation, which we thank for their financial support. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her useful comments. We would also like to thank the participants of the mini-symposium on conflicts of sovereignty organized by the editors of this special issue within the framework of the CES conference (Madrid, June 2019), with a special thank you to Chris Bickerton for his suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In such a perspective, ‘populism’ is neither an ideology, nor a strategy, but a specific articulatory practice (Glynos and Howarth 2007): it unifies heterogeneous demands on the basis of their shared opposition to an enemy who is held responsible for their frustration. The upsurge of these movements takes the form of an opposition between ‘the people’ (this unified aggregate of social demands) and the institutional structure described above, but they can articulate considerably different programmatic content, depending on their ideological repertoire and national context of emergence.

2. However, we did not fully respect this distinction between two periods, as we also decided to include a few significant speeches such as the interventions of Podemos during the debate on Rajoy’s government investiture in early 2016, as well as all these parties’ electoral manifestos over the period 2012–2018.

3. By using the concept of ‘lemma’, we mean that we have grouped together their main inflected forms (e.g.: ‘democracy’, ‘democratic’ and ‘democratically’). In order to distinguish between lemmas and simple terms in the paper, we use capital letters to refer to the former.

4. The deictic vocabulary refers to the vocabulary that describes the context of enunciation itself, whether by specifying identity (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘Mr President’, etc.) or spatial/temporal location (‘here’, ‘room’, ‘now’, ‘yesterday’, ‘this morning’).

5. ‘Turnismo’ refers to the efforts made by the two main Spanish political forces since the democratic transition to preserve the limited rotation between themselves.

6. For a more detailed analysis of the role of war metaphors in the discourse of Podemos and M5S during the economic crisis, see Borriello and Mazzolini (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wiener Anspach Foundation [Collaborative research project];Université Libre de Bruxelles [FER 2018].