From ‘Workers’ to ‘the People’: Left-Wing Populist Discourse in the European Parliament

Until recently, research on European populism had been exclusively preoccupied with the radical right, which has employed anti-elite and nationalist discourse to mobilize support for its nativist politics. While important, this research has neglected a distinct form of populism, associated with the European far left. The rise of populist parties in Greece and Spain has begun to shift the balance of scholarship on this topic although it focuses on support for recent parties like Syriza and Podemos, without examining longer-term trends in the left’s turn toward populist claims-making.  To address this issue, I use automated text analysis of over 100,000 plenary speeches from the European Parliament to examine the left’s political discourse from 1999 to 2012. The results demonstrate that far-left parties have long abandoned a class-base discourse in favor of appeals to “the people,” whose moral virtue is juxtaposed with the corruption of big business and neo-liberal political elites. Given that populist definitions of “the people” are often exclusionary toward ethnic and religious minorities, I then ask how leftist populist discourse structures the symbolic boundaries of its target audience and whether these boundaries have shifted over time. Preliminary findings suggest that unlike the radical right, the European far left does not primarily frame its populist claims in nationalist terms, instead using vague language to extend the concept of “workers” to the population as a whole. This suggests that leftist parties are employing a strategy of inclusive populism similar to that prevalent in contemporary Latin American politics.