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.

The global economic crisis, the popular discontent against traditional parties and post-democratic forms of governance, as well as the sharp increase in migrant and refugee arrivals have led to the resurgence of populist parties around the world. Left-wing parties usually express an inclusionary populist discourse with patriotic features, while right-wing parties utilize an exclusionary populism with strong nationalist and xenophobic characteristics. In Greece in recent years, the radical left party of SYRIZA rose to power through a left-wing populist and anti-imperialist discourse. Alexis Tsipras formed a paradox coalition government with the radical right party of ANEL to reach an agreement that would lessen the effects of austerity policies. However, once in office, SYRIZA transformed some features of its political style and began to follow a type of “pragmatic populism”. This paper examines the relationship between populism and anti-imperialism, while analyzing SYRIZA’s discourse in opposition and in power. The questions that it attempts to answer are: does Tsipras express an anti-imperialist discourse both in opposition and in power? What forces are considered imperialist by SYRIZA? Can the notion of “crypto-colonialism” explain the rise of left-wing populism in Greece?

SYRIZA is the first radical left party in Europe which managed to seize power through a strong inclusionary populist and anti-austerity discourse. In this paper, we examine the political discourse articulated by SYRIZA in power (2015-17) through Laclau’s theory and “Populismus” approach and we utilize the lexicometric tool of “Populismus Observatory” to search the frequently appeared words in Alexis Tsipra’s discourse. “Populismus” is a research project and an open access web-based Observatory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (School of Political Science) that analyzes populism through a discursive methodological framework. The simple lexicometric analysis can help us to sketch a statistical outline of the discourse, followed by theoretical scrutiny. Our aim is to find if SYRIZA transforms its rhetoric after the conquest of power (January 2015) and which central signifiers tends to use and avoid. Furthermore, we argue that the concept of “crypto-colonialism” can explain the dominance of egalitarian populism in the Greek politics but we question the use of the term for any inclusionary populist case. Moreover, we underline the failure of SYRIZA to fulfill the popular demands and we seek out the reasons of this fiasco. Finally, we try to answer to the following question: Does the case of SYRIZA prove that populism fails wherever it comes from (right or left)?

In recent years, and especially after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, right-wing and left-wing populist parties and movements have enjoyed significant political success in Europe. One of these parties is SYRIZA in Greece. In this paper, we explore some of the particular characteristics of the political discourse articulated by SYRIZA in power. The core argument of the paper is that the Greek radical left party continues to express an inclusionary populist discourse after its rise to power. We examine this issue by utilising the methodology of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. Moreover, we attempt to substantiate the view that populism does not always have a negative connotation and is not deterministically associated with nationalism or racism. Furthermore, we try to establish whether the concept of "crypto-colonialism” is an important key to understanding the rise of inclusionary populism to power in Greece. Finally, we analyse various manifestations of Greek anti-populism in order to highlight the danger that derives from this kind of stereotypical discourse.

This article investigates how 'populism' was used in public discussions during the COVID-19 outbreak. It argues that the indiscriminate use of 'populism' and its association with the pandemic is rooted in the negative way it is talked about in public debates. Critically evaluating pundit claims framing populism as an 'anti-scientific', 'irresponsible' and 'authoritarian' response to the health crisis, this article shows that 'populism' does not suffice to explain actors' responses to COVID-19. Rather, populists' ideological positions played a crucial role in their pandemic politics.

In this weekend’s long-read article, Grigoris Markou surveys the re-emergence of Marxist and Communist ideas in contemporary political discourse. Tracing the relationship between Marxism and Populism, Markou concludes: ‘convergence between populism and Marxism seems to be extremely utopian for north European societies, in which capitalism, liberal thinking and excessive consumerism has become so ingrained in the majority of the people’s consciousness. Nevertheless, we have to think about an essential combination of populism and Marxism because, maybe, it is a real alternative path for the contemporary left-wing movement’.

In recent years, Thailand has been continuously facing enormous political and social crises, which resulted in the 2014 coup d’état, the second military coup within the past 8 years. This extremely difficult situation has been predominantly provoked by economic problems, political conflict as well as the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra within Thai politics. Thaksin Shinawatra is a Thai business tycoon and politician who founded the Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) in 1998 and became Prime Minister in 2001. Thaksin’s political discourse was organized according to an antagonistic schema and distinguished between the “people” and the “elites”, constructing thus two chains of equivalences. His populism was a response to social demands of the large masses of Thai people for a better life. However the rise of Thaksin in power was not accepted by the upper and middle class and the elites of the country. The social conflicts between the “non-privileged” people and the middle class and elites led to the coup d’état of 2006. In this paper, we aim to explore some of the particular characteristics of the political discourse articulated by Thaksin Shinawatra before the elections and the coup d’état of 2006. Taking into account the theoretical insights of Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde and others, we will argue that it constitutes a populist discourse which developed over time in response to social demands and has deeply influenced Thai politics.

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.).

In Eastern Europe the successful populist parties are mostly Right-wing nationalist (for instance the Hungarian Fidesz and the Polish Law and Justice) or exceptionally Left-wing populist (for instance Slovak Direction – Social Democracy in Slovakia) with a huge nationalist sentiment. It seems to be that in this region populism and nationalism have been closely related or merged. Moreover, following the traditional literature on populism (Ghita Ionescu, Ernest Gellner), we can easily say that our contemporary “populist Zeitgeist” can be seen as some kind of (post)modern nationalism. In this paper, I am dealing with the problem, how can we define and analyse populism in Eastern Europe. It is hard to say that populism and nationalism have nothing to do with each other, but I am convinced that populism cannot be identified with nationalism. That is why, I introduce the term of historical-theoretical complex of nationalism and populism. According to post-Marxist, critical and discursive literature (Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe) it is obviously that populism is not just a Right-wing phenomenon and there is a thing which can be called transnational Left-wing populism (Benjamin Moffitt, Panos Panayotu). This version of populism is not an unknow phenomenon in this part of Europe, because the Communist regimes before 1989 a transnational populist agenda has been created (Antal, 2017b), but the Left-wing populism is seriously underrepresented in contemporary Eastern Europe. I am investigating here the political theoretical (Antal, 2017a) and historical background of nationalist populism of our time in Eastern Europe analysing examples from the following countries of this region: Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania. My main thought is that the politics in this region has always been populist in that sense there is a constant need to contrast “the people” (as a large powerless group) and “the elite” (a small powerful group). This “never ending” political tradition of Eastern European populism turned up in the history once in nationalist and other times in transnational perspectives. However, the contemporary Right-wing nationalist populism means a relatively new phenomenon, but it has deeply historical ground in the interwar Right-wing nationalism. According to my other hypothesis, the governing Right-wing populist parties (especially the Fidesz in Hungary) use the nationalist discourse to create permanent political enemies inside and outside of the nation (Brubaker argues that this kind of nationalism appears as civilizationsim). These parties belong to the political elite and use populist discourse to cover up their corrupt politics which does not serve the interest of the people. In my view there is a new chapter in historical-theoretical complex of nationalism and populism in Eastern Europe, this is the emergence of populist entrepreneurs using nationalism to maintain their governing power based on populism, which raises several dangers. I will put forward here that the contemporary Right-wing in Eastern Europe was able to rebuild its nationalism as a 21st century populism and the Left said goodbye its nationalist and populist roots and did not reconfigure its populism in transnational scales.