EUREKA PRINT EDISH 2018: ‘ON POPULIST REASON’ AND THE HONESTY OF BEPPE GRILLO
i can’t remember where this came from, nor do i understand enough about italy to make a judgement upon whether it’s in poor taste. But still, Beppe Grillo ladies n gents!
This article is from Eureka Magazine’s print edition. You should be able to find one of the 500 copies of our FORTRESS EUROPE edition in a common room near you, but if you’re summering away (darling!) we’re publishing all of the articles online anyway, so you can carry on watching Call Me By Your Name as the Tuscan sun beats down outside your window in your charming summer villa!
BY DORA DIMITROVA
The results of Italy’s last election (held on the 4th March) have generated much discourse and debate amongst media pundits, largely focused on the issue of populism - what it is, why it arises, and how to counter it. But what do we actually mean when we talk about populism, or when we define a specific party or movement as populist?
The results of this election represented a staggering collapse and defeat of the traditional political forces of both the centre-right and the centre-left, and conversely a resounding victory for so-called populist parties. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia only got 14% of the votes, making it the junior partner in a right-wing coalition with the League, who got 17%. The centre-left coalition, led by the Democratic Party (PD), was perhaps the biggest loser of this election, winning just 23% of the vote; a dismal result from any point of view, as they held an absolute majority in the last parliament after the 2013 elections.
The biggest winners of this last election, on the other hand, were two populist parties: the Five Star Movement, who emerged as the biggest single party with 33% of the votes, and the League. The former was founded in 2009 by the comedian Beppe Grillo on a vague anti-establishment platform including elements of environmentalism, euroscepticism, e-democracy, degrowth and anti-globalisation. The League, formerly Northern League, is a nationalist, eurosceptic and anti-immigration force that used to campaign for a federal system in Italy and even a secession of the rich, industrial North from the poorer South as a means of sowing division between these two parts of the country. Currently, the largest common denominator between the Five Star Movement and the League is their racist, anti-immigration rhetoric.
In his book On Populist Reason, from 2002, the post-Marxist political theorist Ernesto Laclau uses as his starting point the thesis that populism is a vague concept that has eluded precise theoretical definition within academia. What is perhaps more interesting however, in the context of Italy’s current political landscape, is Laclau’s idea of ‘empty signifiers’.
An empty signifier is a word or phrase that evokes a generic connotation of popular justice and fairness. It is empty insofar as its distinctive feature is a rejection of otherness, allowing a hegemonic group identity to be constructed. Its sociolinguistic emptiness, according to Laclau, is what allows populist movements to fill it with whatever political content is expedient in a specific context.
These empty signifiers have been clearly visible in Italian politics for several years now: rottamazione from Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party, onestà from the Five Star Movement, and ruspa from the League. Rottamazione, meaning “scrapping” in the context of getting rid of an old car to get a discount on a newer model, was Renzi’s slogan for his planned shakeup of the political establishment. Onestà, meaning “honesty”, has been used in direct association with the figure of Grillo himself, portrayed as a trustworthy and relatable everyman, in contrast to the stagnant and corrupt establishment which the League’s ruspa (“bulldozer”) is also bent on destroying. As we can see, what all these signifiers have in common is an avowed discursive opposition to the political mainstream, whether left or right.
What I see as the problem with Laclau and his so-called post-Marxist contemporaries is that, being heavily influenced by postmodernism and poststructuralism, they have a tendency to over-emphasise discourse as the main element that structures political interactions, but fail to account for its root cause, despite complex structural explanations of how it is generated. Ultimately, the language people use to talk about politics is a reflection of the environment in which they live. The reason people look towards parties promising onestà, or to bulldoze away the establishment, is that traditional parties have time and time again tried, and failed, to meet new challenges with more of the same politics.
Since the 2008 crash and the subsequent decade of economic sluggishness Italy has been plunged into as a result, both the centre-right and centre-left (not to mention the technocratic government in between), have carried out brutal austerity policies with the promise that Italy would eventually ‘grow itself’ out of the recession. A huge public debt of 132% and 31.5% youth unemployment have exposed the political bankruptcy of Renzi, Berlusconi and all the men of yesteryear who have contributed to the Italian people’s disillusionment with their leaders by, in one way or another, breaking that promise. If Italian populism tells us anything, it is that centrist, monetarist approaches simply do not work.