Abstract
This chapter draws on Laclau’s theory of populism and the political and Stavrakakis’s work on anti-populism to examine two related sets of questions: to what extent populism and anti-populism can be seen in the 2017 Dutch, French (presidential), and German election campaigns and to what extent populist discourses constitute counter-hegemonic challenges to neo-liberal crisis management politics while anti-populist discourses constitute a defence of the latter. The post-foundational discourse analysis that follows identifies (1) left-wing populist discourses (SP, La France Insoumise, Die Linke), primarily nationalist rather than populist far-right discourses in the Netherlands and France, and a combination of populism and ethno-cultural reductionism in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany; and (2) a widespread “thin” anti-populism in the Netherlands, minimal anti-populism in France, and a thick anti-populism of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as the following: “Populism and Anti-Populism in the 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Discourse and Hegemony Analytic Approach,” POPULISMUS Working Papers 7, http://www.populismus.gr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Kim-WP-7-upload.pdf.
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Notes
- 1.
As emphasised in subsequent applications (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Kim 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017), populism thus becomes conceptually distinguishable from (1) what Laclau calls institutionalism, which entails a predominantly differential articulation of demands and thus the construction of a non-antagonistic relation between the addressers and addressees of demands; (2) other types of predominantly equivalential discourse such as nationalism, which pits a national subject against foreign Others, or indeed—as will be seen—anti-populism, which constructs a hostile “populist” threat to an existing order; and (3) different forms of class, ethnic, nativist, and/or religious reductionism, which circumscribe the equivalential construction of a collective subject by reducing the latter onto an a priori privileged differential essence (e.g. Björn Höcke’s “64 million native-born Germans”).
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Kim, S. (2021). Populism and Anti-Populism in the 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Re-politicisation of Post-politics?. In: Wiesner, C. (eds) Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_6
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