In recent years, especially after the outbreak of the economic crisis, the phenomenon of populism is back to the forefront. Populism is all around us, on the front pages of the newspapers, in political repertoire, in academic papers. Politicians, journalists and researchers discuss about this phenomenon, try to define it, examine its principal features and analyze its relationship with democracy. The dominant liberal ideology, however, has succeeded, through a strong anti-populist discourse, in consolidating the idea that populism is a dangerous ideology. Neoliberal technocrats, media and researchers blame the anti-establishment parties and argue that populism is an “irrational” phenomenon that threatens politics and society. But is anti-populism a democratic discourse? In this paper, we examine anti-populism after the economic collapse in Greece (2008/09) and Argentina (2001) to highlight the great danger that derives from this kind of discourse. Greece and Argentina are two countries of the semi-periphery that presents great similarities in politics and culture. Our main goal is to find the main characteristics of anti-populist discourse in both countries to emphasize its stereotypical perspective and undemocratic essence. Finally, we underline left-wing anti-populism and wonder if populism could be expressed by contemporary communist parties.

Published in the Electronic Newsletter of the ECPR-SG on Extremism and Democracy, Volume 15, No. 3, October 2014, pp. 5-7. The Workshop was organised by the POPULISMUS team (Yannis Stavrakakis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Nikos Nikisianis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Thomas Siomos, Ioanna Garefi).

This article focuses on two issues involved in the formation and political trajectory of populist representations within political antagonism. First, it explores the role of crisis in the articulation of populist discourse. This problematic is far from new within theories of populism but has recently taken a new turn. We thus purport to reconsider the way populism and crisis are related, mapping the different modalities this relation can take and advancing further their theorization from the point of view of a discursive theory of the political, drawing primarily on the Essex School perspective initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Second, this will involve focusing on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted equal attention. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution, we will test the ensuing theoretical framework in an analysis of SYRIZA, a recent and, as a result, under-researched example of egalitarian, inclusionary populism emerging within the European crisis landscape.

The aim of this paper is to present how 'populism' is perceived in the website 'Anti-news' as a representative example of the Greek public discourse in the period between 2010-2016, when the economic crisis heavily affected Greece at a political and social level. The paper will also attempt to explain how populism is portrayed through this right-wing oriented media and how their audience perceives populism. Moreover, the paper offers an account of how 'anti-populism' is formulated within this medium and how it contributes to existing notions of anti-populism.

The aim of this article is to investigate “antipopulism” as a distinct discursive repertoire that marginalizes “the people” as the legitimizing cornerstone of democracy. After providing an account of the Greek post-democratic transition from the mid-nineties onwards, I will then delve into what could be described as the “populism/anti-populism” ideologicopolitical divide, as it manifests in the Greek political system and also on the European level during the past few years, and especially withinthe ongoing crisis. The main hypothesis is that “anti-populism” can be seen as a crucial aspect of post-democracy, introducing what could be described as a peculiar Ideological State Apparatus in the Althusserian sense; a way to marginalize disagreement and democratic dissensus and discipline a public sphere in an age dominated by technocratic virtue, expert knowledge and ‘consensus politics’. Key words: the people – populism – anti-populism – post-democracy – Greece Resumen El propósito del artículo es investigar el “antipopulismo” como un repertorio discursivo diferenciado que marginaliza a “el pueblo” como la piedra angular legitimadora de la democracia. Luego de dar cuenta de la transición postdemocrática en curso en Grecia desde la mitad de los 90, ahondo en lo que puede describirse como la división ideológica-política “populismo/antipopulismo” tal como se ha manifestado en el sistema político griego, y también a nivel europeo, en los últimos años y especialmente en la crisis en curso. La principal hipótesis es que el “anti-populismo” puede ser visto como un aspecto crucial de la postdemocracia, introduciendo lo que puede ser descripto como un peculiar Aparato Ideológico del Estado en el sentido althusseriano; una manera de marginalizar el desacuerdo y los disensos democráticos y de disciplinar la esfera pública en una época dominada por la virtud tecnocrática, el conocimiento experto y los “consensos políticos”. Palabras clave: pueblo – populismo – antipopulismo – postdemocracia – Grecia

Conference presentation PSA 68th Annual International Conference (Cardiff, 26 - 28 March 2018) Panel: Populism and Passions: 'mad masses' and 'strategic masterminds' Abstract Since 2009, when the crisis began, Greece is portrayed as an exception to the norm, as the dysfunctional party deviating from the European standard. Within this context populism, according to mainstream political discourse, is a pathology that plays a double negative role. On the one hand, it was responsible for the crisis and it obstructs the necessary reforms and the modernization of the country, prohibiting its return to normality. In that sense, populism is a pure negativity contrasted to the pure positivity represented by “normality” and “modernization”. Two chains of equivalence emerge: on the one hand, that of normality which includes rationality, responsibility, reforms, and modernization, and, on the other hand, that of populism which includes populism and its many negative connotations: irresponsibility, irrationalism, demagogy and so on and so forth. Using qualitative methods and particularly the theoretical and methodological tools that emanates from the Essex School of Discourse Analysis, this paper will highlight how the dichotomy populism-normality was constructed and what forms it took in the Greek mainstream political discourse during the crisis.

In May 2012, when Time magazine asked the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso ‘What concerns you most about Europe today?’ his answer was: ‘Probably the rise of some populist movements in the extremes of the political spectrum’ (Cendrowicz 2012). Since then itis clear that populism, wherever it comes from, has officially been proclaimed as the main enemy of the European Union. In Greece, specifically, after entering the Memorandum era, the phenomenon of populism has been the focal point of intense political wrangling. There has been no opposition party or movement that has not been accused by its opponents as ‘populist’, an accusation which, explicitly or implicitly, is simultaneously backed up with a set of specific characteristics, including social and political backwardness, latent or open nationalism/nativism, cult of the leader, devaluation or even rejection of the democratic rules, irresponsibility, irrationalism, lack of understanding of reality, demagogy or even conscious lying. These arguments, originating in the liberal literature of the mid-twentieth century and especially in the work of Richard Hofstadter (1955), have been uncritically adopted and violently adjusted to Greek reality. The ‘beast of populism’, primarily associated with the Left and social resistances to the Memorandum austerity policies, has acquired mythical features, embodying all the ‘chronic pathologies’ of Greek society and economy: partisanship and polarization, clientelism, corruption, the dominance of ‘guilds’ and trade unionists. Through this strategy, an emerging anti-populist block has attempted to naturalize a negative, pejorative signification of populism,1which was then utilized in the demonization of oppositional political and social identities, attitudes and forces as ‘populist’. The pejorative uses of the term have predominated the politico-social landscape, and populism has been defined through anti-populist discourse. But what is populism after all? Can we define it without ideological, stereotypical blinkers? Utilizing the innovative work of Ernesto Laclau and the so-called Essex School (Laclau 2005; Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Howarth et al. 2000), the POPULISMUS research project has employed a rigorous yet flexible method of identifying populist discourses.2 It has thus attempted to remedy methodological deficits, arguing in favor of a ‘minimal criteria’ approach, as the phenomenon of populism is quite complicated and the utilization of an unsuitable analytical approach may cause comprehension gaps of the issue. In particular, populist discourses should include: (1) prominent references to ‘the people’ (or equivalent signifiers, e.g., the ‘underdog’) and the ‘popular will’ and to the need to truly represent it, (2) an antagonistic perception of the sociopolitical terrain as divided between ‘the people’/the underdog and ‘the elites’/the establishment (POPULISMUS Background Paper 2015). According to the Essex School of Discourse Analysis and the POPULISMUS approach, both criteria need to be present for a discourse to be classified as ‘populist’. Hence, populist discourse always involves a division between dominant and dominated. An important aspect of Laclauian theory, which is strongly influenced by Gramscian theories on hegemony, is that the formation of a populist discourse occurs through the connection of heterogeneous popular demands (logic of equivalence) and the construction of a collective identity (through the identification of an enemy) (Laclau 2005). Moreover, a vital feature of Laclau’s theory of populism is the ‘nodal point’, namely, a central signifier that gives meaning to a discourse, to a discursive articulation. According to Laclau and Mouffe, ‘any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a center. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points (Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept of points de capiton, that is, privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain)’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112). Hence, ‘discourseshould be conceived as an articulation (a chain) of ideological elements around a nodal point, a point de capiton’ (Stavrakakis 1999: 79). Within the frame of the POPULISMUS project, this paper uses the methodological tools of Laclauian theory (nodal points, empty signifiers, etc.), combining them with a computer-based lexicometric methodology. In the last few years, it has been proposed that corpus-driven lexicometric procedures can greatly assist in the study of populist discourse (cf. Caiani and della Porta 2011; Rooduijn and Pauwels 2011). In particular, a lexicometric approach is considered compatible with discourse-theoretical analysis drawing on the Essex School of discourse analysis, which POPULISMUS employed, to the extent that it brackets the supposed intentions behind discursive articulation, while it considers meaning as formed by the relations established between lexical elements (Glasze 2007: 663f.).