Europe has gone through two major crises in the past decade: the refugee crisis and the euro crisis. Both remain essentially unresolved, but have already profoundly changed the political geography of the continent. The refugee crisis proved to be a boon for right-wing populists in the northern countries; the euro crisis resulted in a revolt against austerity measures prescribed to save the EU’s single currency and eventually led to a surge of left-wing populism in the south. [...]
The FSM in Italy and the radical-left Podemos in Spain are often described as mobilizations of angry citizens, especially the young, in the wake of the international financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the austerity measures imposed on southern countries during the euro crisis that followed. Both groups promote themselves as movements, rather than traditional parties (which Beppe Grillo, the founder of the FSM, has declared “evil”). Both benefit from being associated with ideals of direct democracy, in particular, a system of continuous online participation in decision-making as opposed to delegating power to professionals in parties. This story, “from the barricades to the blogs to the ballot box,” is a little deceptive, though. In Spain, the great popular protests against “politics as usual” took place in 2011, yet Podemos (literally, “We can”) was not formed until 2014. Its founders were political scientists who thought the main lesson from the protests in public squares was that the received ideas of the left no longer resonated with citizens. Instead of left-right, they held, the main political divide should be la casta—the caste of professional politicians—versus el pueblo, or simply: arriba versus abajo (above versus below; or, also, a colorful metaphor promoted by the professors: the elites as cats and the people as mice). Podemos’s instigators even concluded, “If you want to get it right, don’t do what the left would do”—though their actual policy ideas about housing and employment, for instance, were often close to what traditional Social Democrats would have offered. [...]
Here, though, the stories of the new parties of southern Europe start to diverge. Podemos has failed by its own standards: its leaders described themselves as “artisans with words,” but the new political language they crafted has not, in fact, displaced the traditional discourse of left and right. Podemos has also not succeeded in overtaking Spain’s established Socialist Party in elections. On June 1, Podemos helped bring to power a Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, after the government of the conservative Mariano Rajoy fell because of major corruption scandals. Podemos has become an all-too-normal looking parliamentary party. It even has its own scandals: Iglesias and his partner, Irene Montero, who is Podemos’s spokesperson in parliament, were recently revealed to have acquired a fancy villa outside Madrid; facing internal criticism, the couple held a plebiscite on whether they should stay in office (which they won by two-thirds of the vote). As far back as 2016, one of the early leaders of the partido de profesores, Juan Carlos Monedero, broke ranks to express the view that the populist “Podemos hypothesis” had failed to realize its aspirations of fundamentally remaking Spanish politics. The mice are doing better, one might say, but they haven’t outwitted the cats. [...]
What makes the contradiction here less glaring is that technocracy and populism, rather than being complete opposites, actually resemble each other in one respect: the technocrat proposes that there is a single rational solution to any policy problem; the populist claims to speak on behalf of the one authentic will of the people, which cannot fail to represent the common good. Put the two together and you get something like the paradox of the current Italian government: two university dropouts—Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, leaders of the League and the FSM, respectively, who have lived their entire lives for, in, and off politics—championing the people while putting nominally apolitical, highly-educated experts in charge of important ministries.
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